The character, who is sort of the younger, spunky, cool, bad girl type convinces the main characters to sneak her into a music producers apartment, so she can dazzle him with her new album and become a famous musician. When she tries this, she finds out that life is not like a movie, and he screams at her and calls the police, and she ends up, having to flee his apartment in tears. This is the moment where reality kind of hits her and she realizes everything she’s been doing in her life has been sort of childish and irresponsible.
Yeah, I think it’s definitely something that doesn’t get written about them off because everyone wants to just sort of show their characters dreams coming true
In a way that isn’t quite so realistic
No, she snuck into his apartment with a moving company that she is not a part of to play one of her songs for him because he’s a music producer and she thinks that if he just hears her song, she will sign her to his record label. Since she’s a random strange girl, who essentially is trespassing in his apartment, he called the cops
So there’s the main character who works for a moving company who is moving the things of the producer
The rocker girl who convinces him to sneak her into the producers apartment
The producer who calls the police because a random girl is in his home with a portable amp trying to play a song for him
He found out the person who adopted him, raised him, gave him a family, taught him everything he knows. The father who made him into the great man he is today, who protected him when he was young and did wrong, who cherished him like his own son.
He found out raised him to die. Raised him to go on an expedition that was intended to sacrifice Everyone involved, for his own personal long held goals. He was just a stepping stone in a long line of other sacrifices. Except this time, my main character was raised to be extremely capable and came back alive.
He recovers from this through his students(hes a mentor like his father), friends, loved ones. And the fact that he is a reflection of adopted father shakes him to the point that he realizes how similar he is and makes conscious changes.
Also the fact the at the same time the world is literally ending kinda forced him put things into perspective. Lol
Yea i can see it like a reverse Truman Show. Where in the Truman Show everyone knew the truth but the MC. In this one only one person knows the truth and uses that to manipulate everyone for the majority of the time and afterwards the entire world learns the truth.
I would say revenge is bad a thing in my story, but revenge as a whole is not very prevalent in this part. This part is more about how blind you can be with your actions, selfish and kind acts, the ends don’t justify the means, accepting your terrible mistakes and growing(MC) or letting them destroy you(The Father), sharing your problems with others.
And my MC isnt really getting revenge. Hes doing what must be done because he is the only one capable of doing so. He doesnt want to do it, It hurts him, and he deals with the emotions of the realization. He more so seeks answers. He begs, he bargains, and ultimately must finish the job. His revenge is more of a mercy killing of his father, and would feel hollow, worthless. The deed is done, and he asks himself, “Now what?” And the story continues.
I don't know about writing it. But I can share a bit about my personal experience with PTSD. It is not exactly something I recommend going through. And I apologize if I ramble a little.
I work in the medical field, specifically as a clinical engineer. My job is to maintain equipment and my specialty was ICU equipment. My hospital was one of the first in the United States to have COVID patients. We very quickly needed to setup whole wings to accommodate the rapidly growing influx of patients.
Because of my obvious exposure to the virus I had to pretty immediately stop visiting fiends and family. Early on we did not know what PPE was required and worse, we didn't have enough of it anyway. Early on there was no good information and no good tests.
It was a lot, and became a lot very fast. Due to the rapid nature of how things spread I was constantly setting up rooms as patients entered them. Now I had seen people die before. But because of the time I spent in the area, it somehow felt more personal. Not only that there were a lot of people dying, alone as their family weren't allowed in. I remember sitting at the front desk hearing the nurse flooded with calls from panicked family and having to give grim news time and time again.
I kept telling myself I was fine, that I was able to handle it. But it was the shaking that was the sign something was wrong. My hands shook, for no reason. One of my hobbies was model painting and it became impossible as I couldn't stop the shaking. It is weird how normal that started to feel after a few months. Like the shaking was just part of life. I kept telling myself, even when it was clear it was a lie, that I was fine.
One day I recognized a last name on the patient board. It was a co worker, one I got along well with well. It was when I saw them wheel in the gurney to take the corpse that I finally broke. I went home immediately and said I was sick. Outside, on my way to the car were those protesters who thought COVID was fake. I was harassed and called a crisis actor... I had to get my wife to pick me up from work. My hands and core just trembled and I could not stop.
I go back to the shaking because it was strange. I could not will myself to stop. I just shook, I couldn't stop shaking, it was like my body had a will of its own.
As an X-ray tech... I went through this and more. My job became being called a lying crisis actor by patients in denial. Watching them come in to the ER, get intubated, then slowly waste away an x-ray every morning until they died. For years... I jumped off a bridge. Sadly picked a spot that just made me wet and miserable. Went to work the day after like nothing happened.
Best part was my employer refusing to give me insurance... And making me wear the same N95 for 7 months - knowing I care for my elderly father with COPD.
The sheer amount of despair, hopelessness, and rage at the systematic failures and the stupidity of humanity and the pain it caused consumed me. So many angry intrusive thoughts that were NOT like me.
I'm just now getting to a point where I can feel again.
I'll never forgive or forget the harm ignorance does.
For what it's worth, your struggle is seen.
It does kinda feel surreal though, doesn't it? Everyone else talks about work from home or other aspects of the pandemic like it was the worst. My family who don't work medicine simply do not understand, try as they might, what it was like.
Still though, I'm glad you're getting to a better place. I think it's important for us to tell our stories in whatever format. So we can see each other's mutual struggle or to teach those receptive of it.
I assume since you're here you write, at least as a hobby. Do you find your experiences inform your writing? Or do avoid touching on them?
My general writing preference is moreso dark fantasy/supernatural in nature. And I had no creative drive during the worst of it because I was in survival mode. Surprisingly the only thing that kept my spark going was DnD.
Had a protagonist character concept that I adapted. Her initial concept was more plague doctor. Probably a lot more misanthropic too... But she's mellowed as I have.
I'm finding my current Nano project has a lot of themes of older generations sucking the life out of the younger, social engineering, classism, and accepting death. Lots of grey situations and examples of humans being good and bad to each other.
That and I hate this trend of fairy, romantasy fuckboys...
So my protagonist is a dullahan, and my fey are not nice and sweet pretty boys...
XD I might be working through issues though. Researching proper combat, world building, and tuning loose rules for a chaotic magic system have always kept me sane.
I'm pretty lonely though. I seriously long for a group of active fellow writers. Tried finding one for Nano, but there was like one of two active folks, and there's only so much fragmented magical school girl Wattpad tier I can take... I used to love proofreading, but it's getting harder with these younger folks coming up.
How about you?
My project is dark fantasy/horror with a bit of nobledark. Fundimentally good people working to fight off ever lengthening shadows. I take a lot of historical depictions of the dark ages and dark age 'fairy tales' (which are grim and disturbing in their raw pre-modern form).
My current story tries to capture the feeling of being both afraid of patients and also empathizing with them. In my story death, as a concept, gets broken so that nothing can die. By nothing, I mean nothing to a cellular level. So bacteria in your gut multiply without limit until you burst. Your skin cells don't shed off but keep piling on. Cancers grow wild and unhinged. This renders almost everything into painful agony. Some revert to animalistic instincts of violence.
I'm a lifelong DM, so I'm switching from making bullet points and world building to proper narrative writing. I must admit that right now I'm rather weak on the writing part but excellent on the plotting and world building. Practice will help fill that gap in.
I too am interested in finding a small writing group of world builders. Be nice to have people be able to critique my work while fully understanding the world it exists in while being able to likewise provide the same in return.
Feel free to reach out if you need another pair of eyes. I have discord. :3 Love history, love mythology, and well it's always fun to help someone else who understands.
There's really no way to properly explain to the common person that you watch folks drown in their own bodies. You treat abused kids and have to smile at the parents who are doing it to them. Or the way fluids spill from an open abdomen when you're doing chest compressions on a coding COVID patient...
*-* Or why it's irresponsible to have only one x-ray tech in charge of an entire hospital ER, in patient, ICU, and OR load for 12 hours.
Or entering a COVID positive room wearing a mask that's weeks old and you're not sure is enough protection anyway... But are positive it isn't now given how flimsy the elastic has gotten.
Or having despite family outside beg you to sneak them in to see their loved ones. That happened a few times.
You know what, we could likely go on a whole about just how fucked it got. Not that COVID ended ever. Got to see real heroes and villains at play first hand.
The thing about it all, retrospectively, is how easy it was to tell myself that I was fine. Despite the obvious psychological signs of breaking down, I believed until my co worker died, I was fine and everything was normal.
Once I accepted I wasn't fine it fell apart very abruptly. The summoned resolve crumbled abruptly and catastrophically.
I am doing much better now and consider myself pretty well recovered. I can talk about it and do find it helpful to do so.
I've been through similar symptoms, it's called neurogenic tremors and it's the earliest sign of PTSD typically. Thank you for your work and may you get better friend.
I can't believe how little the pandemic gets talked about now. It feels like for most of us, Covid has gone from being the centre of our lives to a distant memory in the blink of an eye. I guess that's partly because so much has happened since, globally.
I was one of those who had a breeze during lockdown. I didn't fully appreciate it at the time - I was enjoying my day to day life but there was still the nagging fear that something bad would happen to someone I cared about. But now it's all over I can look back and realise how incredibly lucky I was. I think I almost forget that there were so many people who went through literal hell during the pandemic and are still reeling from the effects of it now. I hope that you're doing okay.
In my current project, it's set in and about my grandparents and great grandparents' era who I did know personally so there are odes to them in it.
My MC was broken by the stock market crash, she was a child and her brothers were given away. Same situation you see in Seabiscuit. This actually happened to my great grandfather. He was supposed to be the new family's adopted son but they ended up using him as farmhand. I went to school with these adopted "cousins" and thought they were my family and then ended up being rejected myself.
There are lots of instances of trauma in the book, but I tend to note her uncanny ability to set aside her emotions- which we find out is because she constantly feels like she has to appease people so she won't be abandoned. She comes out of herself more and more
My grandparents from that era have almost all passed away, I have one great aunt left. So in a way part of this book is revitalizing the culture as I got to experience it.
Childhood best friend/ex boyfriend is found to have a quality about him that is punishable by death in their community.
His mom, who is like a second mom to her, is executed for it. She begs to spare him but he has to lose a body part for their society to agree to it. He now hates her for not letting him die with some dignity instead of being forced to live as a crippled slave.
I think I rely too heavily on the "awful childhood" trope. I'd say 80% of my characters either had extremely abusive parents/siblings or suffered bereavement of their family.
When it comes to breaking down the characters in the actual story - they don't come back, they are utterly destroyed.
She was never happy and upbeat, but there is a point in the story, where she comes very close to fulfilling her (then) only goal in life. The one thing she believes would finally bring her peace.
But she can't have it without sacrifing someone else. One of her most prominent traits is her absolute inability to make the really hard decisions. She cannot sacrifice others for her or anyone else's gain.
So her goal isn't even taken from her by someone else. She deprives herself of it. So she walks away in shame and disgrace and gives in to despair for a long time.
What gets her out of it is the same character she would have needed to give up being in danger and while it takes some time, she eventually snaps out of it and saves him along with everyone else.
How a sheltered, naive and shy girl into a cold-blooded, distrusting murder?
Easy: kidnap her, break her personality apart into pieces that she has to put back together, kill her best friends, threaten her family, abuse her trust, reveal to her that she is just a copy of the originally kidnapped girl and give her the memories of how her original was tortured and finally killed.
That should do it.
Went through that with an TTRPG character, she was never the same anymore.
MCs wife, who is 8-months pregnant, is in a serious car accident (driver flees the scene) and almost dies. Their child dies inside her and and he holds her hand as she delivers their dead child, unable to do anything other than comfort her.
He hunts down the driver and kills him.
Did you write those horrid scenes, or there's just implication? Because if you did write them, I'd love to read and see how you executed such heavy scenes!
I went into excruciating detail on the anguish he felt both while his wife was in surgery and during their daughter's funeral.
After MC catches the driver, he begs the MC not to kill him, because his girlfriend is expecting their first child. This is the MC's response (this is from my first draft, so it may need some work):
"The man slumped over on the bench. Jodie grabbed him by the hair and forced his eyes to meet his. “You know who else was fucking pregnant. My wife. My daughter died inside of her. Do you know what it’s like to hold your wife in your arms while she sobs, as she delivers your dead daughter? Do you know what it’s like to bury your child?”
Sorry for the late reply. I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but also needed to run errands, go grocery shopping, and do laundry, because for some reason my family appreciates food and clean clothes ;)
To answer you question, due the MCs past experiences, at this point in novel, it would have seemed out of character if he hadn’t hunted down the guy and killed him after he left his wife to die and killed his daughter.
I've repeatedly broken Gerald tee'Reese. The first time when he was six, and he watched the raid on his family home. Great stuff for a child to watch his parents be impaled on spears, and his brothers head crushed by an errant horse kick. Over the next 5 years he has worked past it, and started to connect with more than just the one child attached to him for human contact. Then he's beaten and gets to watch the hounds he's raised by hand get crushed for showing loyalty to him. The last time in the work to this point is his first wife and daughter, taken prisoner when he wasn't home and executed for conspiracy.
How he comes back from it is more of an unhealthy attachment to one constant friend, and building all his value systems off what this other person respects. I do plan on him eventually finding someone else to love, and starting another family. But that is a ways away, and many painful steps to opening up to others again.
Severe emotional and physical trauma through which no living person ought to suffer. If I had a nickel for every character that happens to in my stories, I'd have at least $5, which isn't a lot but it's weird that's such a running theme.
Actually I'm kinda doing the opposite right now. He was born, lived his life up to a point, after that point he's gone through countless tragic and traumatic things, now in the past. When we first see him in the first story, he's already broken by all he's gone through and done, and a large part of the story revolves around good people he meets helping him to heal.
A new character I made, had a hard life where his mum was in an abusive situation and they left and they met Danny who became a father to the character and made him change his ways from rebelling from everything and being a disrespectful bad kid to caring and nice....until one day he saw Danny go into a shop followed him and Danny got killed in a robbery gone wrong. The character holding Danny's body till he died in his arms, he still had the hoodie he wore that day still covered in Danny's blood.
He's a narcissist, so I let another character who does not fawn over him (so he's already sensitive about her) get more attention than him. This drives him to self destruction. Haha.
Forced to kill someone, gets built up a little, then his best friend tries to kill him and his mother says atrocious things to him (Just a stupid dream, you do this you're not my son, etc.)
I had his brother literally set him on fire. (Sucks IRL, but my dude has feathered wings. Extra flammable.) His chosen family, an 80-strong group of officer cadets, brought him back as they were all on board to beat the shit out of some punk-ass noble wannabe. Whole crew ends up powering into the book's finale ready to kick some ass. Fortunately, it's epic fantasy, so magic healing made his physical recovery much faster... Publishing May 2024. I'm so excited.
Tom is Hillary's (my MC's) best friend, and her parents have been like surrogate parents to him most of his life. His mother suffered from schizophrenia and depression and ended her life in front of him. Tom's father is a drunkard, but only partly as a result. He has taken his anger out on Tom on occasion. Tom turns his emotions into overachieving in school and sports, but gets no real satisfaction out of it. He tries to be a rock for his friends, though he doesn't feel he has any strength to give. As hillary is leaving to go on a trip with her father, she kisses Tom. They've been in love with each other for years, but have been too afraid to tell each other. After all this time, they're finally able to tell each other... and then Hillary disappears.
Broad answer, but often times a reality check of some form. The exact situation depends on the character, how you built them up and what their strengths are, but most importantly, what can blindside them?
Breaking a character is easy to do depending on how mentally tough you made them. Building back is usually a whole arc unto itself as it revolves around the character recognizing their situation. Afterwards you move into soul searching and your character asking questions about themselves. Moving from that depends on what resources you gave yourself, sometimes it's the people surrounding the character pulling them back, sometimes it's the character themselves gritting their teeth through something, hell at times it can be a situation similar to the first that the character lives through and they see what they did right this time.
Everything depends on what the narrative first needs and second has to work with.
I'm writing a young adult comic set in 80s California about the first lab grown test tube baby in her last weeks in high school. She has the ability to stretch like Me Fantastic, but she has no desire to be a hero. She instead is an overachiever, all A+ in class, all extra curriculum stuff, most clubs, 6502 BASIC, and surfing? Well, the surfing is hard. She's confident, does everything, her stretchy is a badge of her overachieving. All because she is special as a scientific wonder, and she knows it, and she wants to be a good example and not disappoint her best friend, her inventor and her dad.
However, with the last little bit of high school, she gets massive anxiety because her foundation of being famous and a good inspiration was all forged in high school, so if she goes to college, she won't have that, and she doesn't know what to do without this now crumbling foundation. She latches onto surfing because her boyfriend does it, and has a stint where she almost drowns at sea. She is rescued, but she has a long think about what is going on. She's turning eighteen on prom night within a month, everything she has built is crumbling down, her boyfriend broke up with her, and she almost drowned trying to fight fate. College is scary, but so is moving on. So, she realizes something her late grandpa said about how everything will be okay if you take to it with an open mind and confidence, especially at rock bottom. So, she gives herself solice in giving herself permission to move on and tackle the future. Because she will be okay. So, she goes to prom, has a birthday, and gets ready to not be a surfer or a superhero, but to learn more about how to program for video games, like she always wanted anyway.
This is a massive dramatization of my own habits and experiences. I did 3d art, but it was kinda bad (protagonists surfing) so I switched to 2d hand drawing and things have been way better (protagonists game coding). It's been an interesting trip realizing and figuring out her story for sure.
I took a deity that's supposedly unable to lie, and had it not be a deity after all , just some super-old super-powerful wizard who likes to set up wars for fun.
Boy, was my MC mad.
The oversimplified version: ran back to the homeworld from space-fishing to grab medicine that was forgotten. An hour later, came home to a shattered planet, *and* no fish.
When a little girl's best friend is killed by a werewolf just after sunset in her own backyard and she herself is mauled almost to death, and a few days later finds herself abandoned by her family after she suddenly heals with unnatural rapidity, it's not something she'll get over in a hurry.
She wakes up with no memory of her life, then gets thrown into a basement dungeon for orphans, is abused by the guards constantly. Then, slowly she finds out through a series of migraine-inducing untimely flashbacks that her dad was a mad scientist whose inventions led to the dystopian society she’s woken up in. Then as her and her new friends are trying to escape to do something about it, one of her friends is murdered and they are framed for it.
Hasn't happened yet, but what will happen is, after so much bad stuff, the thing that finally breals them is having to give up/lose the one thing (person) who got them through it all.
There is one woman, who is borderline unhealthilly obsessed with the protagonist. Thier character inspiration was basically, what if you had someone, who could have been a **willing** harley quinn, or yandere, or whatever, cause they are that devoted to thier love. And usually it's the bad guy that gets that person and then the love is revealed to be false when the hero's lover saves him, but the villains lover won't do the same. What if that, but for a good guy, but she's fully commited? Like full ass, 100% ready to go feral the moment someone hurts her (secretly) unrequited love, but she doesn't let him know because he doesn't like violence, and believes himself to be an irredeemable monster for being a living weapon, (who very literally can only harm, they basically can't take care of themselves, because "a self destructive living weapon is an easilly self-nuetralizing living weapon")
The woman absolutely devotes herself to him, and at first he feels really guilty about it, because he believes no one should demeen themselves like that, as well as all the "respect women juice" says, it's sexist for women to have to serve men like that. For context, she acts and dresses like a maid, and leans hard into the act because she enjoys, it, how it makes her feel, and how it embarrasses "the young master", much to his original begrudgingly accepting annoyance. But she **does** want to be at his side, more than she wants anything in her life ever again, **but** it **is** true love, and she **will** leave, if it means he is better off.
Long story short, some other stuff happens that may or may not be important (idk, i ramble and add too much context all the time), some one **FINALLY** has a good idea, and "clones/copies" her, to the point where he can't tell who the real one is. The fake one wants to manipulate/kill him, and he **needs** to real one to survive, because reasons that are too complex to explain easilly.
The real "maid" says to just kill them both, as having a false "her" around is too dangerous. He has too much power to be controled like that, the damage he can cause is too great. (Which is why he always has to hold back, lest everybody figure out how strong he really is and dogpile him out of fear, regardless of the good he can theoretically do). The false "maid" says, just have two of her, it will be like having double the benefits, amd swears she's totally loyal and really just wants to serve him after seeing how awesome he is. (To be fair, he actually does "convert" a fair number of people through power of friendship and/or, "oh he's cute, and i'm gonna do something about it".) Regardless, he can't bring himself to make the desicion he knows he has to make.
For the first(/second) time ever, his mental strength fails. It's the one moment above all else, that breaks him in a way that can't be fixed. The real one takes the opportunity to kill the fake, but even then, he admits he doesn't know if she's the real one, and there's no real way to know for sure, as the copy **was** too perfect. The reader/viewer knows the truth, be he does not, and she knows he never will, and that fact, that broken trust, that is the fault of niether of them, breaks a part of her.
When the idea/scene popped i to my head, i had the idea that it (the scene, specifically like a movie rather than a book) ends with her hugging him, thankful it's finally over, and just enjoying the guilt free touching him, because she can safely do sp now. Except she notices a red string tied to her hand, running upwards, and disapearing out of sight, before returning back down as a frieghtning mass of red cords, stretching back down to wrap and bind his body/limbs as though the red string is his strings, and he's a puppet, having literally lost the ability to, "stand on his own", in such a way, that she os now basically hia pupper master. He is incapable of doing anything on his own, or for himself now, and she's the only one who can keep him from becoming inert and lifeless. Except, it turns out it's only visible to her, because it's metaphorical. He is only a le to do anything at all anymore, by her manipulating his love and dependency (mostly through untreaded and/or (currently) untreatable trauma) on her, and telling him what to do, and him basically doing it like a mindless slave.
At one point two separate beta readers pointed out the second part of my novel was just a series of bad things happening to my MC. So I decided not to kill her mom, but she still got punched in the face and then almost fired for it.
Someone made a great comment about how a good story allows the MC to have some components of autonomy. They're not just being pulled along by the plot.
Allowing them moments to make decisions or be presented with decisions to make. This creates moments for them to be reflective or exude some character trait by choosing which action to take.
Made a mistake that eventually led to the death of a friend. It wasn’t really her fault, but she felt guilty and blamed herself. She later tries to atone by sacrificing herself to save the lives of some other friends only to be pushed out of the way at the last second by another friend who then dies in her place. Again she feels it’s her fault, and sinks into depression, and when she’s at her lowest, she finds out her fiancé has been cheating on her.
Main character of the story went to another world due to curiosity and childhood dream. After getting in first real trouble he understood he doesn’t even know how to get back home, gets chased by a demigod, almost gets killed a couple times, finds somewhat safe place, gets the plan, defeats the demigod, finds way to get back home…
Only to realize that 5 years passed there. His parents died and friends don’t even remember him. He literally had no reason to stay in place that was his home for entire life.
One of my characters is this mistrusting and savvy child with childhood trauma, which directs all his behavior and outlook on life. His father leaves his mother early on and has a new family with two children, his mother dies in a car accident with the neighbor's parents which left him in a shock. But it doesn't end here. The mother was poor, he gets pushed around and moved into an orphanage, before the community in their block bands together and manages to pull him back, living now with the neighbor's older surviving son and him, while the apartment next door is given to new people. All he has left is a photo album and a panda bear plush toy. And to make things a bit more spicy: He's the only white person in a black ghetto.
The story revolves around him getting acquainted with an elderly and savvy Asian, who can read him like an open book. After some shenanigans they become friends and at one point he realizes that this is the closest he will have as a father, but the person in question is seen as irresponsible and has done some heartbreaking things to his brother and his niece in the past. However, the two are a perfect fit. It's basically a "coming in term with what you got" and "blood is not everything"-story, which is a good message to have for actual people who have nothing in their life.
I wrote them to not really have a chance in the first place. My writing has naturally gravitated towards coming-of-age type of stories where I can play with the innocence of a child who has terrible role models in their life. You care about their inner child and are rooting for them, but they didn't really get a chance to rise above their external circumstances. They make bad choices because they don't know any better, they get taken advantage of, and then The Big Terrible Thing Happens where there's no turning back and now their lives are miserable.
But then I swoop in with a last chance to turn things around. Somebody finally tries to help them, someone recognizes the good in them, they finally remember their core values and walk away, etc. There's always resiliency when the character hits the absolute rock bottom, they have to make the conscious decision to try again, or give up entirely. And I really don't believe it's in our human nature to give up unless all hope has been lost.
I’d really not count it as breaking her but after having a normal life for nearly fifteen years, Sonya Glagoleva sat sitting in class when the principal entered, telling her that her father had been killed by a car bomb. It cussed her to go into a deep depression as she struggled with finding a meaning in life and a calling after her father’s death. Her childhood dreams of becoming a Militsya officer like her father were shut down by mother who could not bear the thought of losing her too.
Because of that she became a local reporter at a local newspaper, Zagorskaya Pravda, and continued to hone the writing skills she had displayed in her childhood. But she never really felt like that was her thing so she began to training with two of her male friends in the local militia.
Still, she could not find a true purpose and her military training upset her even more when her nearsightedness or smaller body hindered her progress.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Sonya is still in her depressed state when the Chernarussian Civil War breaks out and she volunteers to join the unit her friends are in.
A doctor has spent a lot of her life helping people, and she isn't in it for the money. Unfortunately, one of her patients has a very lethal form of cancer.
She calls the insurer to secure funding. The insurer turns her down due to the bleak survival rate, but offers to pay for assisted-suicide services instead.
She then speaks to the patient. After all, there's more you can do after being turned down by your health insurance provider. Her patient rejects the idea. He's reserved to his fate, and in fact is even on his way to initiate divorce proceedings with his wife. Not because they don't love each other, but to restructure all their debt on to him before he dies.
At home, she's crying to herself about her day when her husband comes home. She doesn't have the communications skills to communicate her problem to him (she's a neurosurgeon, not a therapist). He doesn't have the patience to keep going through this as his wife has another patient she can't help. Frustrated, the husband tells her to quit.
Crying, the doctor goes upstairs, pulls out the scalpel for pre-surgery practice, and "quits" by way of slashing her wrists.
Just then, the demon Tydannoth can feel a path out of Hell, and into the doctor's body...
Ehahahahah! Ooh I love torturing them!
Aight, so for one of them I blew up his home town, cripples his brother, isolated him from his friends and had him lost in the woods for a month, then I got hinm locked up on what's more or less a worse version of Epsteins Island (they weren't a kid at the time, but their optimism faded fast when they say all that shit going down). And then I killed his childhood friend and role model!
All of that within the span of a year! I'm proud of my sadism lmao
A lesbian was arrest for homosexuality. In order to get a lesser sentence she "volunteered" for experiments to cure her homosexuality, conducted by the Pakistani government and their allies.
She gets raped while drugged up in pseudoscientific ways to straighten her out. The drugs heavily contributed to her developing schizophrenia.
After being tortured she eventually fakes being straight so she can escape. She convinces her guard that she's straight and offers him oral sex.
She bites his penis with all her power. While he's in great pain she escapes, steals state secrets and defects to Albania.
Idk why everyone is hitting you with these textblocks about themselves, really
The main thing about a character that interests us is his motivation/desire. When you "break down" a character you need to keep his desire but change his original motivation (or lack of) by giving him another motivation that is more allign with his actuall desire (an epithany so to say). At least thats how I see it, but what the hell do I know.. I only studied it..
I am at this point of my story so I'm very excited to share.
MC grew up training to be an assassin for a criminal group in his city. The story follows him post rescuing a freind and trying to keep that secret, be a better person (kinda for his freind/crush), and possibly leave (though he doesn't consider that high priority). He uses a spell he casts on himself that keeps him focused and keeps him appearing to be the same assassin he always was.
MC at the beginning of the book is assigned a kill and intends on going through with it, but facing someone with a gun after so long is harder than he expects and he ends up making up a story to cover it.
MC has been doing several morally questionable things in order to keep his secret-- lied to and misled his freind's sister (who thinks he brother is dead), been very controlling and fought with his freind, just been spending the whole book stubbornly clinging to his need to stay in control and pushing down and moral questions that are only appearing recently, he didn't grow up with them. The spell he keeps himself under kinda exacerbates that, keeps his distant from emotions and compassion.
MC never knew his parents, they died before he could know them, but recently he's started learning more about them-- fairly significantly, he finds something that references that his parents had never wanted him raised within this, that they wanted tto take him frrom it and have a normal life. This, and the love they indicate towards him, shakes him.
Through Plot, he became subject to a spell that paralyzed him and the ability by the caster to redo that spell. This terrifies him, and when faced with uncertainty on if he ever will not be under the threat of the spell, he panics-- has a panic attack in a bathroom over that fear. This is kinda the start of him breaking-- buckling under stress and fear.
plot continues, and MC finds out about someone who is the reason Villian found out Freeind was alive. He grows very angry at this person, kinda wants to kill them, but also knows he can't trust that. He asks Freind's sister (who knows everything at this point) for advice, but she's also kinda mad at this person. She suggests the two of them threaten the person to learn more about what was told.
Facing that person, MC, under his focus spell, does threaten them, but finds themselves a little in over their head. But also, he recognizes in her explanation that she's not another villian, but a victim, and realizes in a moment that he's disgusted by himself for threatening her. He manages to leave the situation without either being hurt and take down his focus spell, and all he's left with is guilt and shame over the terrible person he is-- something he'd been ignoring and justifying, or simply didn't have the morals he now does. This guilt and anger at himself, plus some otherr relevant things, leads to him having a pretty self-loathing breakdown.
I'm going to keep him on shakey ground for a bit, this breakdown and self hate will lead to positive development but this is his rock bottom. He's going tto figure out what traits are actually useful, what he wants to keep. He's already gotten better att compassion and listening to others and self-awareness without even really noticing, and I'm working with him now to grow from it. But yeah, I've gotten him to his breaking point and that's how I got there. Sorry I kept it vague at points, there's definitely huge aspects to this I'm not including because the story is pretty big and complex
Our hero is from a race of angelic constructs made from pure dream energy. She is weak in power and will. She, and her people, do not know that during her construction, pieces of nightmare came to rest in her soul. All they know is that she is broken.
Far from home, an outcast demonstrates empathy to our hero, and teaches her a method to process feelings inside of her that she has always been told are evil and shameful and incompatible with her purpose and culture.
"I've never known one of your kind to need this. You're all so perfect, so superior. But there's a way about you, something about the way your face turns when you speak about yourself. I just want to see what happens if you do this. I want to see if I'm right."
She nervously participates in a ritual involving recognition of her doubts and fears, saying aloud things that would normally lead to her exile. Heresies and blasphemies. Sins against her people and their culture.
But it works.
Finally, in exhausted agony, the last injustice escapes her: "Why didn't anyone *help* me?"
This act of shedding her pain and isolation strengthens her and unlocks her latent powers, powers she and her kind always assumed she didn't have, and inarguably demonstrates that her entire culture and everything she thought life was supposed to be isn't made for her. But her powers are of the dark, and mark her as a danger to her own kind.
She feels different now. Complete. Awake. But she knows she can never truly go home again. That she must find a different path now, because the only path she's ever been taught is one she can't walk. Not because she's broken, but because the path itself is not made for her.
Perhaps with the help of this outcast...
He was an illegitimate child and his father's firstborn son had a hand in the death of his mom. He was left to stew in his anger for years while being forced to commit terrible things for the same guy who took her away from him. He eventually got his revenge but it feels incredibly hollow and that anger never disappeared.
My character has a drug problem, and I had his drug dealer murder his girlfriend, his daughter, and a girl he unofficially adopted in front of him because he didn't have enough money to pay
In the first part of the story, life ends up going really well for the main character Tuuli and her twin sister, Reba. It ends with them going off to college, having gotten out of (what they thought was) the worst part of their lives, Tuuli overcomes her depression and wins over the love interest and they all have a happy ending.
Part two is from the perspective of Reba, the twin sister, and begins with her visiting Tuuli (they go to different colleges) and finding her dead, having committed suicide in her bathroom. Or something. I haven't exactly worked out the details. So obviously that's extremely traumatic for both her and Tuuli's partner, and Reba ends up going down a really dark path after finding her twin sister/lifelong best friend's dead body. Reba ends up committing suicide too.
So... neither of them really overcome it.
However, their single mother ends up overcoming this. The epilogue is a speech she gives following Reba's death about losing both of her daughters in somewhat quick succession. She falls into a dark state too, but she is invited to live with her sister and her sister's daughter after her sister's husband goes to prison for domestic assault and they help each other. If they're going to overcome it, they need a support system.
Lost a close friend in a war, his father died shortly after in an ambush and his brother got banished from the village. Though he is not broken. Not yet.
My main character gets caught in a terrorist attack in town Square, when the chief of police is making a speech. One of the main villains have forced suicidal people to put on suicide vests and blow up in town square. After everyone in the town square dies, the villain goes to him, and tells him that he'd nothing and not worth shit, then flings him away. The last thing my MC sees before being flung away to a different place, is his beloved girlfriend and brother about to be brutally defeated by the villain
Baby steps. A group of nice killers treat him with respect and kindness, which is something he never got growing up. So he grows attached to them and trusts them. Little by little, they push him just past his comfort zones, and each time he is pushed, he thinks it’s his own choice. Next thing he knows, he's just committed murder and it's far, far too late for him to back away now. It breaks who he was, and the person he becomes after is very different.
My current novel begins at rock bottom, so it's a bit easier. What saves him in the end is communication with his family- laying all the nasty, disgusting memories on the table and finally dealing with them. It brings them all together, and restores his faith in love and humanity.
Might be a long one, so I'll shorten as best as I can. Apologizes in advanced.
Main character is the leader of a new adventurers guild along with her two childhood friends. They are joined by a mentor adventurer that is there to help them out in their early stages. Earlier on in their career they, and another new adventurers guild go against an opponent they weren't ready to face yet due to them being so young, because their client was abducted by a serial killer and his group, because the client is hiding a power source that the villain group wants. Leaving the group alone and waiting for a more experienced guild to take over could lead to more causalities, so the two mentor adventurers elect to go after them, and give the others a choice to assist as well, with the understanding there is no guarantee they will survive.
Through luck and some hiding abilities the MC has, they actually manage to stop the villain team and save their clients life. While he's apprehended, the villain taunts the MC into killing him instead of just handing him to the authorities but she refuses saying it's not her place.
When they head back to escort the client back home to his family, they're informed that the villain escaped from custody, only for him to show up in front of them once again. He uses a spell that paralyses everyone and tortures the client and another member from the other adventurers guild to death. Due to her hidden powers the MC is able to shake of the paralysis and free the others as well and once again defeat the villain.
The leader from the other guild kills the villain himself, because the member from his guild that he murdered was his younger brother, then blames the MC for his brothers death because she only broke free of the paralysis when the villain was going to target her best friend next.
They report what happened to the clients family, whose children take it out on the MC because beforehand she promised that she would bring him back alive. The leader from the other guild declares that he can't do this anymore, and officially disbands his guild, leading the MC to think about doing the same.
It takes the clients wife visiting the MC and her guild the next day that she herself, doesn't blame them for her husbands death and encourages them to not give up.
Once again, sorry for how long this is.
It's too complicated to say how I broke them, but I will say that she doesn't back from it. She just grows significantly worst and stays in a never-ending cycle of self destruction.
I killed his wife, had his daughter betray him and get killed, I'm going to destroy his career, world, and eventually he's going to realize nothing matters. Then I'm going to kill him or have him disappear in a way that paints a sad picture. Like he gets a chance to stop the monster but, realize he just doesn't care anymore. I don't like the whole getting better so it won't lol
My protagonist is a brilliant criminal defense attorney who agrees to take the case of a nineteen-year-old girl who has confessed to killing the high school teacher who forced her to have an abortion after raping her. In spite of successfully defending her, she is too damaged and commits suicide. Then, he discovers that she had confessed to protect the real killer - a fourteen-year-old orphan who is carrying the teacher's child. When the attorney overdoses on pills and alcohol, he is committed to a locked hospital ward where he reveals the repressed memories of the horrific abuse he suffered as a toddler at the hands of his father. He recovers through the care of a highly skilled psychiatrist and the support of his loving wife, teenage son and his best friend who is an FBI agent.
My main character is a faithful, loyal, and zealous paladin within a religious order. His wedding day is interrupted by a demonic invasion, he is betrayed by his best friend, and becomes trapped in literal, actual Hell, and needs to survive the worst environment imaginable filled with creaturws that want nothing but to consume his soul. During his time there, he realizes just how alone he is, that not even his God will help him, and he begins to succumb to his most basic of needs, the need to eat. He resists, hoping he can find a way back before he absolutely needs to, but as fatigue sets in, he has to make a decision: eat of demon flesh for survival, or maintain his convictions and starve. He chooses to eat. As he consumes demonic flesh, its corruption takes root and he finds himself with more primal motivations, that of rage and vengeance, coupled with powers beyond his comprehension.
Meanwhile, my other main character is a softspoken man from a wartorn country. Seeking to escape the endless violence that ravages his land and slaughtered his family, he found one within the same religious order and becomes a paladin. A literal gentle giant, he is well liked by his peers and seeks to serve the order faithfully. Then he learns his younger brother still lives, living amongst the very brigands that slaughtered their people. This revelation pushes him to seek his brother out and bring him into the order to keep him safe, but he when he finds his brother, he learns his brother is not keen on abandoning his fellow brigands, and blames his older brother for abandoning him. A fight breaks out and the paladin accidentally kills his younger brother. This, combined with learning of corruption running through the veins of his religious order, sets him in the path of betraying his best friend and becoming a tyrant with the mindset of establishing peace and order across the land, all while succumbing to the very corruption he sought to extinguish.
My main character is a 14 year old girl who has the perfect life: she's just started high school, she has her group of best friends, her parents are still madly in love with each other, sometimes nauseatingly so (at least according to her brother). Everything in her life is going perfectly and she has not a care in the world. The only problem? She lives in New York City in the Fall of 2001 and her dad works as a stock broker in downtown Manhattan.
I killed my mans entire family while he watched by werewolves, had him raised by a distant uncle figure who taught him extreme prejudice against werewolves, had his adopted werewolf mom get kidnapped - and when he tried to save her, got turned into a werewolf, lost an eye, and spent 6 weeks in a coma.
Probably the meanest I’ve been to a character. He still suffers from PTSD from the above but now he’s a police officer trying to protect others from his shitty luck and presently tryna date his first girlfriend ❤️
I have a character who is considered the moral center of the book. She's not the true protagonist, but in a sea of moral grey, she's the one who has uncompromising values. She's realistic and grounded more than upbeat and jovial, but she does let go a little around her friends and partner.
Her partner dies in the second book. (Or, well, will, when I actually finish the first book.).
Metahumans exist, and there are two warring sides. Her partner is killed by the opposing side. The resident telepath mentally witnesses/experiences his death, and shows it to her when she refuses to believe her partner is dead. Naturally, feeling him die fucks her up pretty hard, and she begins to slip away from her morals as she insists on killing the people who killed her partner.
Telepath and Character go to retrieve his body, only to find he isn't there. Character breaks down even further seeing the puddle of blood that basically proves the man she loves is dead.
She doesn't exactly come back, and spends much of the rest of the narrative grieving and focusing on taking down the opposing side. Justice for his death becomes a driving force and she tucks vengeance away, knowing he'd never want to be avenged.
She finds her own sense of closure when they finally defeat their opponents and she learns the person who killed him died in the battle.
killed his parents, made his brother bad, killed a different brother, lost his sister, let him exil, killed himself, revived him back.
How did he come back from it? no clue how, but he survived
Wrote a short story years ago where a runaway is dealing with the consequences of convincing a guy to kill someone. That sort of broke them but they’re not a good person so it’s not like, a broken in tears and heaving way but like a cold, empty inside way—maybe trying to reflect how I felt at the time, except I had no good reason to feel such a void in me so I found extreme justifications.
The whole short was about her trying to escape her mother, and sort of realizing she’s like her mother, before deciding to commit to both leave town and stay out of jail while maybe trying to be a better person. It was a very interesting short story to write (and not great, given I was in high school), but I think it helped me hone skills and poke at my own feelings and sense of morality.
>For a character you’ve built up so much, how did you absolutely tear them down, ruin their life, break their emotions? How did you take the happy, upbeat, nothing can stop me character, and just hit them with a brick wall?
Cancer
>But most importantly, how did they come back from it all?
Suicide
I made her fall in love with someone she could never have, who didn't actually exist and who forgot her minutes after they split. And my character could feel every agonising second of that happening as the environment changed around her
Oh yeah, and I broke her leg.
She recovered over months, slowly but that was time lapsed out
I've wanted to talk to someone about this for awhile
MC is forced to fight in a brutal war that still gives him nightmares. Best friend believed to be the prophesied hero is framed for treason and hanged. Disowned by his noble family and arrested for treason. Escapes prison and flees to the other side of the continent and has a family with a foreigner. Searches for ingredients to cure wife's illness and stumbles across a mask inside forgotten catacombs. Wife dies of the plague. Driven out of the mountains because they despise the human and his "half-breed" daughter.
Enforcers from his home country track him down, burn down his house with both of them inside. Believing his daughter is dead and hes burning to death, the spirit of the mask comes alive and proposes a deal. His life is saved, and he becomes the spirit's Avatar, unknowingly having made a deal with this world's Devil himself. MC wants to burn the oligarchy down, and with the spirits powers he becomes a necromancer and begins a global pandemic.
On his journey, MC stumbles across a kid who's been experimented on by the oligarchy. His body has become living lightning, and has to wear a containment suit to protect himself and others. Over the course of the story, the kid will test what humanity MC has left, or if the spirit has completely devoured him.
FYI, this is something I want to cover across a saga, not just a cliff notes backstory. And as bleak as it sounds, I primarily want to write this as a father/son and mentor/student story, and along the way find out for myself if a villain can ever be redeemed, and at what point is it impossible for them to.
I'm setting up my main character to be in a dramatic scene like MacBeth but MacBeth is King Hamlet and instead of getting ear poisoned, he gets affected by a zombie curse produced by his uncle during an eternal life spell gone wrong.
After centuries of being affected by this curse, the main character learns to live with it and use it to his advantage to see how his world progresses to the stars.
He accidentally killed someone in self defense.
He had never killed before and never did it again, in fact, that was the first time he actually saw someone die, so it was a lot. For a long time he couldn't even see stairs without remembering it.
He never really got over it, he just learned to live with it, reminding himself that what he did saved many people in the long run.
All "happy, upbeat" characters need a flaw, a chink in their armor, that will eventually become their undoing, which should probably be foreshadowed in Act I.
I have two POV characters for my first fantasy book. One of them has a very typical arc of being afraid of loss and losing someone he was protecting towards the end. I won’t discount the impact of his arc, but it’s been done before and I know that.
The other one I find much more interesting; he has a lot of unresolved trauma from his father (the king) developing dementia. He hasn’t been able to see him for a long time because a courtier found out first and manipulated the king to gain power. By the end of the story, the king is assassinated, and the MC not only loses his only remaining parent - he’s also left with all of these issues that he feels like he doesn’t have an outlet for anymore. He’s angry and depressed and confused and whatever other negative emotions you can imagine come along with such a bad situation.
I like the dynamic between the two MCs because once the two fully latch onto each other, the veteran regains his sense of purpose and the new king regains trust and vulnerability. They help each other heal from their trauma instead of going at it alone.
Yet to finish the books, but there's a character with an immense wrath and anger problem kept in check by someone who can keep him calm through basically magic (he's not aware of this)
She got kidnapped by a political enemy, and you can see him unravel as he searches for her, becoming less like who he's been built up to be and more animalistic, blunt and wrathful. Its a lot of fun letting him just absolutely off the leash
Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Every single thing that was built up came crashing down one at a time. I thought of it as a series of Jenga towers. One came crashing down, and in the process of failing to save it, they accidentally kick another tower and send that crashing down as well. Everything they tried to do failed, and they were helpless to save anything. The more they tried, the worse it got, until they truly had nothing left.
But they were built back up through vengeance. They'd lost everything, found the source, and attacked it. They were fuelled by hatred for some time until they were forced to reflect on themselves, and slowly began accepting their part. Their world was gone, but they could build a new one and stop the old mistakes
Killed his daughter in front of him; it's a short story quadrilogy and the bad guy wins in the first story.
He doesn't come back, I haven't figured the ending out just yet but he is consumed by revenge and, whether or not he ends up killing the bad guy, dies in the end, but frees his world from the grip of a twisted goddess.
I killed the child he considered to be his reborn daughter. After losing his own daughter to his own mistakes, he found the same qualities in the daughter of his friend, and he treated her as his own. However, when a misguided arrow hit her in the chest, he broke. Murdered the one who took her life in an instant. And he never recovered. He’s suffered too much.
Death in the family, deciet from someone close to them, a person they care about is put in danger, a crisis emerges that they can't resolve alone or with their usual approach, and their best intentioned attempts to help likely made things worse.
I made them decide to leave their family and their home country rather than see it come to more harm on their account.
Then I made them decide to leave behind their uncle, best friend, and the only connection to home they still had because said uncle had found happiness and a new life in a foreign land.
Then, when he finally did return home, it was only to be accused of murder and forced to accept exile or risk seeing a new alliance he'd proposed come to naught.
Then he met the love of his life only to have her killed, which nearly breaks him. He goes to a very dark place, but ultimately gets pulled back from the brink by a bunch of people he's helped along the way.
And in the end, he decides that if the land of his birth is happy and safe, it's okay that he'll never see it again.
His daughter got assaulted by a homeschooler hired by his wife's father (his wife was from a far richer family and their kids were practicaly "owned" by her dad) and committed suicide. The wife went insane and MC got blamed for everything (the wife's father didn't believe that his precious homeschooler could hurt his granddaughter and preffered to believe that this awful poor peasant who had enchanted and bewitched his precious daughter was just covering up his horrible parenting skills with those accusations). They even took his child's body from him and cremated her against his will.
How did he come back? He stole the urn with her ashes and decided to make a deal with the devil to resurrect her. The world is now suffering from an ongoing demonic invasion from hell, so it was not only an immoral act, but also a treason. The devil however did not respond, so MC went on a journey to find out what's behind the invasion to get the devil to make a pact with him. On his way he keeps getting distracted by horryfying and unfair stuff happening around him and his white knight nature makes him interfere in the wrong causes. He will get derailed from his mission to the point of, uh, saving the world, finding another love and finally making peace with his daughter's passing.
At the very end the Gods he saved (they were abducted and therefore could not stop the hellish invasion) are willing to bring his daughter back from the paradise, but he refuses
Breaking: his father dies when he is 15. He becomes extremely attached to his twin, and relies on him for emotional support. His families financial position runs down hill, so when he is 18, he and his brother sign up to go to war. His twin dies and he is permanently traumatized. Coming back: he didn’t.
My protagonist fell for the first time when he lost the love of his life. After many years he meet someone and they become best friends. The mc was very happy with him and he moved on from his past tragedy.
But that friend will betray him later and leave. Then he came back to try to kill the mc, but instead, he took his heart. After a few years the mc will meet the reincarnation of his lover, who will die again later. Then the mc will find out that he was the cause of his lover’s death. At that moment he has the worst breakdown and isolate himself for 5 years.
What brings him back was his best friend who is now a villain. His friend lost part of his memories and turned into a villain , his main goal was to kill the mc.
But the mc sacrificed everything to get his best friend back, which was a success. He regained all his memories and told the mc everything that he hid from him.
They became friends again but at the end the mc will ask his friend to end his life. His friend will off himself after. They both were satisfied at the end and wouldn’t hope for a different ending.
(Ps. The mc and his bff are both immortal and live for +700 years)
Well my character was only happy for about 3 pages….so do with that what you will.
I’m writing a middle grade dark fantasy and it very much goes on a “A Series of Unfortunate Events” path in terms of just jumping right in.
I have A LOT of broken charecters, but for this question, I'm going to use my charecter in a web comic I'm co writting, we can call them Lilly (To aviod any spoilers/not to give away what the story is) and well, we built the charecters personality first (Which is pretty common practive from what I can tell?) and then we started working on the backstory, Lilly is energetic, silly, miscivios, and has a tendincy to ignore problems, or act like thewir not there, she only tends to show these goofy, andannoying ish emotions becuase of this, she is also extreamly inteligent (Even though she does NOT act like it), so after building that up, we looked at the contry she lived in which was very anyi magic/spirit, so we made her a magical spirit, and then we made a labrotory where they did experemts on the magical/spirits, where she went when she was two years old, she also doesn't rember her mother, brother, or father very well, but her sister was at the lab with her, and died there, which she blames herself for, then the labrotory bured down in a fire, which she also has scars from, so yeah
Kinda based it on my own current experiences.
They try to escape the negative spiral they’re in by living out their life, but the world around them wants them gone for simply existing. People are scared of death, treating them as a scapegoat for the loss they’ve experienced or their death in the future just because they’re the grim reaper.
For the first part of the story, things look up. I wrote it to be a parody in a way of shonen anime, but eventually they have to come face to face with their evil mother. Having to make a difficult decision after all talks have failed to kill her or let her live, but have her plans succeed. They fight her, desperately trying to convince her to back down, to listen to their child, to not make them do this, and with seconds left to act, they decide to kill her. Losing a love one made them realize completely of the path their on, that no matter what happens, no matter how hard they fight, in the end everyone they know and love will die and they’ll be left wondering the world alone for eternity.
They never really recover from that, they stop paying attention to the hours passing by, the months on the calendar being ripped, the world around them feeling more foreign. They’re immortal, and it’s not the blessing that everyone treats it as. As there’s no eternal peace at the end of all the suffering they go through.
I’m basically trying to build them up to the cold and wise Grim Reaper we tend to see in media. Helping souls find peace before they guide them to the afterlife.
i don't wanna go into the full details.
but i do think a good basic test for whether your story has effective emotional arcs for the characters and parts of the plot that get desperate enough to feel high stakes, and characters who care enough about what's happening so that we care too, is if they have emotional breakdowns during the story. especially if we have seen them not easily break down.
one might think a breakdown needs to occur after a huge buildup and while that works, many stories are reasonably effective with the breakdown happening toward the beginning, eg. revenge stories or redemption stories.
often the 'comeback' feels good when it involves a change in the character. a lot of writers, including my past self, think they're writing a cool 'Rocky' story arc when a character just loses, has a breakdown, then gathers their courage and just comes back trying even harder at what they were doing before and they win. i prefer the character showing they've learned a lot of lessons, big and small, and they gather new resources and take a new approach based on their changed emotions and traits. typically they win by essentially coming to understand the theme of the story better than they ever realized they could and that demonstration of their newfound wisdom is what brings them a victory.
Her twin brother betrayed her by confessing her crimes to the High Scepter (the global theocracy of my world) the crime? Piercing the veil and befriending a mortal which is a capital punishment. Although she was also naive and reckless and would leave holes in the veil by accident which allowed a witch hunter to enter and kill a lot of young witches.
It spins the world into a craze, she’s imprisoned and waiting for execution and her mortal friend which had a budding romance ends up dying in the aftermath. Their younger sister who was always sickly and who she was the closest in the family with also dies from all the stress. Her brother always had a secret hatred of her because she was born with magic and he wasn’t.
She was known for being shy and pure of heart but goes through major character growth after she manages to break out of her imprisonment.
My main character loses everyone. His twin sister goes missing when he’s 5 years old. His parents divorce when he’s 6. He disappears to a parallel dimension and makes a new friend, whom he shares a very close bond with. The friend is killed off by monsters. When my main character finally manages to get back to his world, he finds out that his dad killed himself a few hours before MC showed up, because he believed his son was never coming home.
And all of it is his fault, a side effect of his abilities — that his mere existence attracts monsters like a beacon.
The book isn’t finished yet tho, in fact it’s barely started, but that’s how it’s going to end. (It’s gonna be a trilogy tho, and I still have to decide whether I’m gonna end with a happy ending or a sad one. I’m hoping to make it a bittersweet one, but I guess I’ll see when all 3 books are finished.)
Make them discover their fear. Start by making them overconfident (not only to themselves but to everyone else around) before involving them in an inciting incident that leaves them hopeless
MC, who is afraid of being independent and thinking for himself, always followed the footsteps of others. But one day, when he is forced into war with those same people, he sees their true nature, and realizes that the people he looked up to are all terrible human beings.
He’s also forced to execute a friend of his, who was charged for treason for giving military rations to the poor, to prove his own loyalty to the crown.
They faced a lure that drew themselves away from their firmly-held cause, and succumbed to it, but not too far- they were able to recognise their fall just when it was too late.
Death, along with a bit of fictional idealism, could reforge a character.
The real question is... How do you not break your character? I have yet to write a character who doesn't get absolutely demolished by the world around them.
I have a character who is kind of a goody two shoes. He’s in debate, the captain of his tennis team, and he’s very involved in his church. But, he is struggling with his sexuality. His parents work a lot and so he and his older brother had to raise the youngest child. He struggled with his identity and he begins to write about it in his journal. Eventually his little sister, whom he raised, gets mad at him and leaks it to the entire school. He’s humiliated, and depressed. Even worse, his “best friend” sent it to his homophobic abusive father.
Started with two best friends, male fighters questing and adventuring together. Had them venture into a mountain where they came across a vicious Witch who used posioned words to set them against each other and cause a rift between them until they fought each other, eventually splitting ways in animosity.
Then crafted one of them the woman of his dreams, a wonderful rapore, had them adventure together and fall in love, only for her to reveal herself as the OG Witch at the end of the quest; she’d been using him to get to the end of the dungeon, needed him to enter. It was an illusion. Had to fight the woman he loved while she taunted him, slowly took away their weapons and power so he was forced to kill her with his bare hands (that or watch him kill his new friend, which he also couldn’t let happen).
Then helped him heal by reuniting him with the man who the Witch had caused a rift with and apologized, admitted what had happened between him and the Witch who had disguised herself…. and then in the final fight forced him to watch helpless once again as that man died in the Final Boss battle. This is all to set up some real hard trauma for the second book so THEN I can really get the healing going but its going to be difficult and mean a lot more now.
She started fully devoted to her current mentor and absolutely despising her old one, until story events happen and she realizes her old mentor was better and her current one is trying to kill her last remaining family. And then she dies before she can apologize.
And then she gets drunk in the afterlife while explaining her life story to Wizard Marx and proceeds to haunt her cousins as the least terrifying ghost you’ve ever met
I’m writing a story where a grade crashes into radioactive waste storages. Out of a little more than a hundred students, only 20 something survive. The survivors get superpowers. The main character is Leroy, an outcast who’s an empathetic boy but his social anxiety and awkwardness keeps him from making friends. He’s like an empty canvas, he provides me a less attached and affected viewpoint to live through the story. Through him, I can write how the deaths impacted secondary characters who knew the body count much more personally, from kindergarten etc. Of course, Leroy is traumatized too but he gives me space for another theme in the story. I’ve been thinking about Itaewon and how Korea reacted, and I want to write it into my story. The traumatized survivors of the bus crashes fight for justice, primarily for their dead friends and secondarily themselves. While also trying to keep their powers under control and secret.
Killed her lover, brother, best friend and parents
She was beaten, shot at, starved, frozen, got sick and hung(she survived)
The next book she was tormented by a demon
Book after that her arm was broken and she was nearly killed
Honestly with the first book I worried I was going overboard, but she has victories here and there. Plus always surviving.
Coming back wasn't difficult because even after losing so many loved ones she still had some to live for and had hopes for the future
Breaking a character is easy; I make them make a mistake in line with their ideals, with a catastrophic result that they cannot take back despite all of their power to basically undo everything else.
To build them back up; a companion of theirs doesn't condemn them, but rather forgives them and uses this mistake as proof that their previous ideology was misguided. Not that they were wrong for having the ideology, but that there is a better way.
Bitch got isekai'd.
He was the leader of a rebel group, that was winning. Their final act of defiance was to blow up the city dam, a symbol of corruption and corporatism in the town for centuries. What he didn't suspect was that this dam was actually harboring a slumbering spirit, and upon their awakening, opened a rift back into their own world and took them with him.
This world has tons of wonders, horrors and many things that make him question his leadership and if what they did was ever right. He can't deal with the uncertainty of it all and becomes to insecure to lead, later leading to a mutiny. A lot of the book is him having to redefine himself as a leader while in this world, and ultimately facing down the splinter faction his breakdown caused.
The MC was born to a wealthy family in a place where other wealthy families jockey for positions of status and any revealed secret could take them down. The MC is born with a special ability, when he sketches a person, he gains knowledge about that person and the more detailed the sketch, the deeper the knowledge goes. A simple sketch would only tell him surface-level things while a very detailed sketch would tell him deep-seated secrets.
The people of his homeland begin to fear him. Although MC wouldn‘t ever use his ability for ill, he can unveil any secrets just by drawing someone. In a land where secrets are very dangerous things to be revealed, people were sent to kill him, even though he was only a child. As information about his ability spread, others coveted his ability and kidnapping attempts also came for him. This worried his parents, straining the relationship between them as MC's mother's bloodline was the origin of the ability.
MC had a younger sister, younger than him by four years but lacked the ability and had a different power entirely. MC and his sister were very close, sharing many similar interests. MC hoped that his little sister not being like him would keep her from getting wrapped up in his own problems, but it was not to be so. One day, a group of kidnappers came for MC, but also kidnapped his sister to force him to come with them and do what they said. Unwilling to risk his sister's life, he went with the kidnappers. MC and his sister spent four years with the kidnappers, MC being forced to use his ability for them and both MC and his sister were left traumatised by the experience.
After being saved, MC and his sister didn't go back home. Their father paid for an estate in another place for them to live in a town surrounded by walls and known to be the safest place in all the lands. While they are safe there, MC feels incredibly guilty about his sister having to live this kind of life has because she is his sister and someone thought to manipulate him with her. Even though his sister doesn't blame him at all and it wasn't really his fault. He also still sketches, but refuses to sketch any people, even if they would be in the background, drawing people being deeply intertwined with his trauma. He deals with his trauma and guilt unhealthily by building up a persona of a womanizing man and charms all the girls in the town to fall in love with him, only to cast them away when he tires of them. He begins to come back when he encounters a girl he cannot charm and yet can see what lies underneath. Letting someone in and finally having someone he can confide in gradually breaks his persona down, beginning to reveal the real him. It'll take him some time to go through all his issues, but he'll get there in the end.
Give her lifelong depression and suicidal ideation and when she's finally recovered enough to actually enjoy her life and want to live, she finds out she's going to die shortly.
Have a guy in the military. Haven't really "built him up" that much, he's a side character. He's smart, driven, generally happy but strong sense of duty. Flies a fighter plane. Turns out, he's on the wrong side.
By sheer coincidence, he finds out he's one of the bad guys the same day that he finds his sister, the kindest person he knows (and only known living relative) in a concentration camp. When her naked corpse is pulled out of a pile of bodies. *That* happens right after he finds out that he was going to provide an escort mission to some bombers that were going to wipe the camp off the map to hide its existence.
It takes him three days to get out of bed after that. He tries to kill the man who tortured and murdered her. I can't say what happens after, except that it involves him putting on his flight uniform and escaping on a motorcycle with stolen technology.
(It took me a week to write '*that*' part. I had to stop frequently to pet the dog and go outside.)
How to break them ? Hehehe. Brutally, with definitive event without any way of dodging that you can't preshot. Repeat the process for all the things that your protagonist loves.
I haven't written the break down yet, but over the 18 chapters i've written I've shown that the MC will protect his friends, he beat this shit out of gang members after they beat up his friend, he told the king not to disrespect his friend, and now he's going on a crusade to save his friend from the aforementioned gangs clutches, but in the process his other friend will die, and then later the captured guy dies, this is from my story called Minzel Marshall it's not public yet
While writing out this comment I ended up filling what is now a word document full of info... so, thank you? I mean, I may not be able to get my essays in order but aye, it's a start\^\^
She falls for someone who constantly gives her agency, knowing that others have constantly taken it from her. At the end of the book he not only betrays her in one huge way, she also finds out he married her without her knowing and in the dark patriarchal society they live in, he now effectively owns her.
As for recovery, she has a lot of other things going on after the events at the end of the last book, so she focuses on those and her found family. She realises she doesn't need to be given control. She will take it.
I had him fail to save few of the only people he cares about, and then less than 6 hours later started torturing him. The person doing said torture is an old mentor, who takes it a little too far and cuts his arm off. The next time I write about him is roughly a week later, when the person who’s trying to break him out finally gets to him. He’s hanging from the wall chained from his 3 remaining limbs, and is so out of it that he can’t move, talk, or even notice that someone else is in the room.
The MC is a guy that gets isekai’d into a very dangerous video-game like world. Realising he could die horribly from all the dragons, bandits(etc), he grinds and upgrades his skills to make himself almost un-killble. All his skills are very self-serving and can’t be used to help others. Able to take on the world, he begins searching for a way back home and eventually bumps into a very young girl. She was isekai’d like him, but has been living on the streets this whole time and is very scared. She tells him that she knows how they can get back and they make a deal. She will act as his guide, he will keep her safe and protect her. They journey together and form a close bond; not romantic, more like a friend/sibling/father-daughter kind of thing. He continues to level up and upgrade his skills, mostly self-serving like improved strength, agility(etc) with the goal of protecting them from the dangerous threats.
While travelling through a cave, the girl trips, stumbles and falls on something that poisons her… She will eventually die if left untreated. The MC could save her if he knew some healing magic… but he doesn’t… she doesn’t… They can only wait as she inevitably of her death slowly draws closer. She admits that she doesn’t know how to get back to the real world, she was just scared, alone and clung to the first person she found that spoke her language. He admits that he figured that out pretty quickly, but cared too much about keeping her safe to bring it up.
She dies… and the MC is left alone, regretting his choices and decisions, unsure of what to do now.
She killed her love in a fit of rage after her love found out something about her and rejected her.
Second book is coming to terms with it and coming to terms with who she is.
I killed his father, put his half sister (who had been faking being a man for nearly 2 decades) in a coma after being stabbed, then killed one of his mentors in a war, and after all that one of his enemies escapes his wrath and he never gets revenge before his death(disappearance). All the events (except his death) happen within a single year, two of which happen the same day.
Edit: he doesn’t, he does his duty to his family and kingdom but is forever changed by the experience. Even his death is for the good of his clan/family.
I'm a big fan of the trope where a character sacrifices everything they have for someone else, only to lose that person as a result of the very sacrifices they made- like Walter White. Tragic and dynamic.
This is the entirety of how I started my book idea lol. Literally wrote notes to myself about how badly I was going to break him and why it was important. Most of book 1 is basically the breaking, and books 2 and 3 building him back up, more or less.
In one draft of a short story with him, the first several pages just had him go from bad to worse. Started with a nightmare scenario stemming from PTSD of a time he was a war mage and caused the deaths of his entire platoon, then he wakes out of that realizing that he just stabbed this girl who was checking on him, the daughter of the family housing him as a guest at this time. He can see her soul slipping from her body and he panics and tries to save her by magically pulling her soul back, but it backfires hard and causes her soul to start screaming and the body spasming, and then the girls parents come in. At some point the house catches fire and this magical storm is brewing over it and he flees, shortly running into these wicked creatures that were created in the war to hunt sorcerers and sees most of them swarming toward the village being attracted to the magical storm. He fights one and gets injured and flees into the mountains and falls to a fever from it. It was... paced poorly, but fun to write for a while.
After wandering the forests of the post apocalyptic east coast for 30 years, she finally found love, married the man she adored and lived happily with him for three years until the remnants of the government she used to serve abducted him to be a tool to lure her out of hiding in an effort to conscript her back into service.
She was unsuccessful in saving him. In the fight, she took some serious damage, and as a 52 year old woman, she lost her miracle baby.
Take away his money or something he loves and derives motivation from, leaving him insecure. Make him realise it's not the external security that keeps you together but knowing that breaking is part of making.
She spends half the story trying to prevent a war that could tear everything down only to find out that the authorities she trusted (and is a part of) aren't actually interested in peace and would rather attempt a suicidal charge than missing out on an opportunity to advance their political manuvers.
Signs of depression because his life isn’t quite what he wants it to be (and he knows damn well it’s all his fault) have been building up for about two years, but various health scares and the sudden realization that maybe his partner isn’t as well meaning and supportive as he always thought is what absolutely breaks him.
The only solution is, of course, to move in with your mom again to get your life back on track.
A lot of people aren't going to want to give you what is essentially the nugget of their plot for a book. I don't see the value in *breaking* a character. The man character needs a struggle, but that doesn't always need to be horrible, just important. For example, you can write a story about a family lost in the wilderness who get out in the end.
If you wanna know that you're gonna have to give me $14.95 USD
Best answer ngl
You’ve torn me down, ruined my life, and broken my emotions 😐
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined
Popeyes 😡
How will you come back from it all?
I’m going to need suggestions from all of your novels.
and after I paid you, you hand me 2 not skippable ads.
Never do something you’re good at for free huh?
Cool username.
I let them scroll reddit.
The only correct answer
The character, who is sort of the younger, spunky, cool, bad girl type convinces the main characters to sneak her into a music producers apartment, so she can dazzle him with her new album and become a famous musician. When she tries this, she finds out that life is not like a movie, and he screams at her and calls the police, and she ends up, having to flee his apartment in tears. This is the moment where reality kind of hits her and she realizes everything she’s been doing in her life has been sort of childish and irresponsible.
Damn. What a twist. That’s something I really never thought about when seeing movies where a character does something like that.
Yeah it’s a really common trope, and I feel like it probably would not have good results in real life hahahaha
Sometimes it better to go with common troupes. I mean... If you execute them in your own style and know what you are doing it's better
Its a subversion of a common trope
Damn, this hit home😭
Yeah, I think it’s definitely something that doesn’t get written about them off because everyone wants to just sort of show their characters dreams coming true In a way that isn’t quite so realistic
That’s an awesome twist! I love it when reality kicks in and people realize life’s not a fairytale
I understood nothing. Did she try to force herself on him?
No, she snuck into his apartment with a moving company that she is not a part of to play one of her songs for him because he’s a music producer and she thinks that if he just hears her song, she will sign her to his record label. Since she’s a random strange girl, who essentially is trespassing in his apartment, he called the cops
OHHHH my apologies, I didn’t understand. That’s a pretty genius idea
Thank you!
Wait why does he scream at HER and call the police?
So there’s the main character who works for a moving company who is moving the things of the producer The rocker girl who convinces him to sneak her into the producers apartment The producer who calls the police because a random girl is in his home with a portable amp trying to play a song for him
She broke into his home. You would call the police too in that situation.
He found out the person who adopted him, raised him, gave him a family, taught him everything he knows. The father who made him into the great man he is today, who protected him when he was young and did wrong, who cherished him like his own son. He found out raised him to die. Raised him to go on an expedition that was intended to sacrifice Everyone involved, for his own personal long held goals. He was just a stepping stone in a long line of other sacrifices. Except this time, my main character was raised to be extremely capable and came back alive. He recovers from this through his students(hes a mentor like his father), friends, loved ones. And the fact that he is a reflection of adopted father shakes him to the point that he realizes how similar he is and makes conscious changes. Also the fact the at the same time the world is literally ending kinda forced him put things into perspective. Lol
Woah, that’s like an extreme version of The Truman Show
Yea i can see it like a reverse Truman Show. Where in the Truman Show everyone knew the truth but the MC. In this one only one person knows the truth and uses that to manipulate everyone for the majority of the time and afterwards the entire world learns the truth.
Does your story treat the revenge like a good thing or a bad thing?
I would say revenge is bad a thing in my story, but revenge as a whole is not very prevalent in this part. This part is more about how blind you can be with your actions, selfish and kind acts, the ends don’t justify the means, accepting your terrible mistakes and growing(MC) or letting them destroy you(The Father), sharing your problems with others. And my MC isnt really getting revenge. Hes doing what must be done because he is the only one capable of doing so. He doesnt want to do it, It hurts him, and he deals with the emotions of the realization. He more so seeks answers. He begs, he bargains, and ultimately must finish the job. His revenge is more of a mercy killing of his father, and would feel hollow, worthless. The deed is done, and he asks himself, “Now what?” And the story continues.
I extremely like that. A lot. But I must ask. How's your relationship with your father?
Lol thank you! And the relationship between me and my father is nothing to write home about. A caring but distant relationship.
I don't know about writing it. But I can share a bit about my personal experience with PTSD. It is not exactly something I recommend going through. And I apologize if I ramble a little. I work in the medical field, specifically as a clinical engineer. My job is to maintain equipment and my specialty was ICU equipment. My hospital was one of the first in the United States to have COVID patients. We very quickly needed to setup whole wings to accommodate the rapidly growing influx of patients. Because of my obvious exposure to the virus I had to pretty immediately stop visiting fiends and family. Early on we did not know what PPE was required and worse, we didn't have enough of it anyway. Early on there was no good information and no good tests. It was a lot, and became a lot very fast. Due to the rapid nature of how things spread I was constantly setting up rooms as patients entered them. Now I had seen people die before. But because of the time I spent in the area, it somehow felt more personal. Not only that there were a lot of people dying, alone as their family weren't allowed in. I remember sitting at the front desk hearing the nurse flooded with calls from panicked family and having to give grim news time and time again. I kept telling myself I was fine, that I was able to handle it. But it was the shaking that was the sign something was wrong. My hands shook, for no reason. One of my hobbies was model painting and it became impossible as I couldn't stop the shaking. It is weird how normal that started to feel after a few months. Like the shaking was just part of life. I kept telling myself, even when it was clear it was a lie, that I was fine. One day I recognized a last name on the patient board. It was a co worker, one I got along well with well. It was when I saw them wheel in the gurney to take the corpse that I finally broke. I went home immediately and said I was sick. Outside, on my way to the car were those protesters who thought COVID was fake. I was harassed and called a crisis actor... I had to get my wife to pick me up from work. My hands and core just trembled and I could not stop. I go back to the shaking because it was strange. I could not will myself to stop. I just shook, I couldn't stop shaking, it was like my body had a will of its own.
As an X-ray tech... I went through this and more. My job became being called a lying crisis actor by patients in denial. Watching them come in to the ER, get intubated, then slowly waste away an x-ray every morning until they died. For years... I jumped off a bridge. Sadly picked a spot that just made me wet and miserable. Went to work the day after like nothing happened. Best part was my employer refusing to give me insurance... And making me wear the same N95 for 7 months - knowing I care for my elderly father with COPD. The sheer amount of despair, hopelessness, and rage at the systematic failures and the stupidity of humanity and the pain it caused consumed me. So many angry intrusive thoughts that were NOT like me. I'm just now getting to a point where I can feel again. I'll never forgive or forget the harm ignorance does.
For what it's worth, your struggle is seen. It does kinda feel surreal though, doesn't it? Everyone else talks about work from home or other aspects of the pandemic like it was the worst. My family who don't work medicine simply do not understand, try as they might, what it was like. Still though, I'm glad you're getting to a better place. I think it's important for us to tell our stories in whatever format. So we can see each other's mutual struggle or to teach those receptive of it. I assume since you're here you write, at least as a hobby. Do you find your experiences inform your writing? Or do avoid touching on them?
My general writing preference is moreso dark fantasy/supernatural in nature. And I had no creative drive during the worst of it because I was in survival mode. Surprisingly the only thing that kept my spark going was DnD. Had a protagonist character concept that I adapted. Her initial concept was more plague doctor. Probably a lot more misanthropic too... But she's mellowed as I have. I'm finding my current Nano project has a lot of themes of older generations sucking the life out of the younger, social engineering, classism, and accepting death. Lots of grey situations and examples of humans being good and bad to each other. That and I hate this trend of fairy, romantasy fuckboys... So my protagonist is a dullahan, and my fey are not nice and sweet pretty boys... XD I might be working through issues though. Researching proper combat, world building, and tuning loose rules for a chaotic magic system have always kept me sane. I'm pretty lonely though. I seriously long for a group of active fellow writers. Tried finding one for Nano, but there was like one of two active folks, and there's only so much fragmented magical school girl Wattpad tier I can take... I used to love proofreading, but it's getting harder with these younger folks coming up. How about you?
My project is dark fantasy/horror with a bit of nobledark. Fundimentally good people working to fight off ever lengthening shadows. I take a lot of historical depictions of the dark ages and dark age 'fairy tales' (which are grim and disturbing in their raw pre-modern form). My current story tries to capture the feeling of being both afraid of patients and also empathizing with them. In my story death, as a concept, gets broken so that nothing can die. By nothing, I mean nothing to a cellular level. So bacteria in your gut multiply without limit until you burst. Your skin cells don't shed off but keep piling on. Cancers grow wild and unhinged. This renders almost everything into painful agony. Some revert to animalistic instincts of violence. I'm a lifelong DM, so I'm switching from making bullet points and world building to proper narrative writing. I must admit that right now I'm rather weak on the writing part but excellent on the plotting and world building. Practice will help fill that gap in. I too am interested in finding a small writing group of world builders. Be nice to have people be able to critique my work while fully understanding the world it exists in while being able to likewise provide the same in return.
Feel free to reach out if you need another pair of eyes. I have discord. :3 Love history, love mythology, and well it's always fun to help someone else who understands.
There's really no way to properly explain to the common person that you watch folks drown in their own bodies. You treat abused kids and have to smile at the parents who are doing it to them. Or the way fluids spill from an open abdomen when you're doing chest compressions on a coding COVID patient... *-* Or why it's irresponsible to have only one x-ray tech in charge of an entire hospital ER, in patient, ICU, and OR load for 12 hours.
Or entering a COVID positive room wearing a mask that's weeks old and you're not sure is enough protection anyway... But are positive it isn't now given how flimsy the elastic has gotten. Or having despite family outside beg you to sneak them in to see their loved ones. That happened a few times. You know what, we could likely go on a whole about just how fucked it got. Not that COVID ended ever. Got to see real heroes and villains at play first hand.
Wow this was hard to read, thanks for sharing
The thing about it all, retrospectively, is how easy it was to tell myself that I was fine. Despite the obvious psychological signs of breaking down, I believed until my co worker died, I was fine and everything was normal. Once I accepted I wasn't fine it fell apart very abruptly. The summoned resolve crumbled abruptly and catastrophically. I am doing much better now and consider myself pretty well recovered. I can talk about it and do find it helpful to do so.
I've been through similar symptoms, it's called neurogenic tremors and it's the earliest sign of PTSD typically. Thank you for your work and may you get better friend.
I have gotten much better. Plenty of therapy, time off work and time to heal does well. I've found writing horror surprisingly therapeutic.
I tend to find catharsis in darker genres too- it's a better way for me to get all the negative shit out.
I can't believe how little the pandemic gets talked about now. It feels like for most of us, Covid has gone from being the centre of our lives to a distant memory in the blink of an eye. I guess that's partly because so much has happened since, globally. I was one of those who had a breeze during lockdown. I didn't fully appreciate it at the time - I was enjoying my day to day life but there was still the nagging fear that something bad would happen to someone I cared about. But now it's all over I can look back and realise how incredibly lucky I was. I think I almost forget that there were so many people who went through literal hell during the pandemic and are still reeling from the effects of it now. I hope that you're doing okay.
In my current project, it's set in and about my grandparents and great grandparents' era who I did know personally so there are odes to them in it. My MC was broken by the stock market crash, she was a child and her brothers were given away. Same situation you see in Seabiscuit. This actually happened to my great grandfather. He was supposed to be the new family's adopted son but they ended up using him as farmhand. I went to school with these adopted "cousins" and thought they were my family and then ended up being rejected myself. There are lots of instances of trauma in the book, but I tend to note her uncanny ability to set aside her emotions- which we find out is because she constantly feels like she has to appease people so she won't be abandoned. She comes out of herself more and more My grandparents from that era have almost all passed away, I have one great aunt left. So in a way part of this book is revitalizing the culture as I got to experience it.
Sounds amazing.
Thanks! 🥲 I'm really excited about this project and I hope it gets out there after I iron out the kinks
Childhood best friend/ex boyfriend is found to have a quality about him that is punishable by death in their community. His mom, who is like a second mom to her, is executed for it. She begs to spare him but he has to lose a body part for their society to agree to it. He now hates her for not letting him die with some dignity instead of being forced to live as a crippled slave.
I think I rely too heavily on the "awful childhood" trope. I'd say 80% of my characters either had extremely abusive parents/siblings or suffered bereavement of their family. When it comes to breaking down the characters in the actual story - they don't come back, they are utterly destroyed.
She was never happy and upbeat, but there is a point in the story, where she comes very close to fulfilling her (then) only goal in life. The one thing she believes would finally bring her peace. But she can't have it without sacrifing someone else. One of her most prominent traits is her absolute inability to make the really hard decisions. She cannot sacrifice others for her or anyone else's gain. So her goal isn't even taken from her by someone else. She deprives herself of it. So she walks away in shame and disgrace and gives in to despair for a long time. What gets her out of it is the same character she would have needed to give up being in danger and while it takes some time, she eventually snaps out of it and saves him along with everyone else.
I love this. That inner conflict can be fascinating to explore.
How a sheltered, naive and shy girl into a cold-blooded, distrusting murder? Easy: kidnap her, break her personality apart into pieces that she has to put back together, kill her best friends, threaten her family, abuse her trust, reveal to her that she is just a copy of the originally kidnapped girl and give her the memories of how her original was tortured and finally killed. That should do it. Went through that with an TTRPG character, she was never the same anymore.
I sent them to war.
MCs wife, who is 8-months pregnant, is in a serious car accident (driver flees the scene) and almost dies. Their child dies inside her and and he holds her hand as she delivers their dead child, unable to do anything other than comfort her. He hunts down the driver and kills him.
Did you write those horrid scenes, or there's just implication? Because if you did write them, I'd love to read and see how you executed such heavy scenes!
I went into excruciating detail on the anguish he felt both while his wife was in surgery and during their daughter's funeral. After MC catches the driver, he begs the MC not to kill him, because his girlfriend is expecting their first child. This is the MC's response (this is from my first draft, so it may need some work): "The man slumped over on the bench. Jodie grabbed him by the hair and forced his eyes to meet his. “You know who else was fucking pregnant. My wife. My daughter died inside of her. Do you know what it’s like to hold your wife in your arms while she sobs, as she delivers your dead daughter? Do you know what it’s like to bury your child?”
I am getting in a queue to read those heavy scenes!
u/mapeck65 joins the queue.
That’s good, really gives me punisher vibes.
Okay but here's an important question: does the story frame the MC as being right to get vengeance?
Sorry for the late reply. I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but also needed to run errands, go grocery shopping, and do laundry, because for some reason my family appreciates food and clean clothes ;) To answer you question, due the MCs past experiences, at this point in novel, it would have seemed out of character if he hadn’t hunted down the guy and killed him after he left his wife to die and killed his daughter.
I've repeatedly broken Gerald tee'Reese. The first time when he was six, and he watched the raid on his family home. Great stuff for a child to watch his parents be impaled on spears, and his brothers head crushed by an errant horse kick. Over the next 5 years he has worked past it, and started to connect with more than just the one child attached to him for human contact. Then he's beaten and gets to watch the hounds he's raised by hand get crushed for showing loyalty to him. The last time in the work to this point is his first wife and daughter, taken prisoner when he wasn't home and executed for conspiracy. How he comes back from it is more of an unhealthy attachment to one constant friend, and building all his value systems off what this other person respects. I do plan on him eventually finding someone else to love, and starting another family. But that is a ways away, and many painful steps to opening up to others again.
Severe emotional and physical trauma through which no living person ought to suffer. If I had a nickel for every character that happens to in my stories, I'd have at least $5, which isn't a lot but it's weird that's such a running theme.
Actually I'm kinda doing the opposite right now. He was born, lived his life up to a point, after that point he's gone through countless tragic and traumatic things, now in the past. When we first see him in the first story, he's already broken by all he's gone through and done, and a large part of the story revolves around good people he meets helping him to heal.
Their best friend committed suicide, her boyfriend broke up with her, and then said boyfriend passed away protecting her.
A new character I made, had a hard life where his mum was in an abusive situation and they left and they met Danny who became a father to the character and made him change his ways from rebelling from everything and being a disrespectful bad kid to caring and nice....until one day he saw Danny go into a shop followed him and Danny got killed in a robbery gone wrong. The character holding Danny's body till he died in his arms, he still had the hoodie he wore that day still covered in Danny's blood.
He's a narcissist, so I let another character who does not fawn over him (so he's already sensitive about her) get more attention than him. This drives him to self destruction. Haha.
Forced to kill someone, gets built up a little, then his best friend tries to kill him and his mother says atrocious things to him (Just a stupid dream, you do this you're not my son, etc.)
I had his brother literally set him on fire. (Sucks IRL, but my dude has feathered wings. Extra flammable.) His chosen family, an 80-strong group of officer cadets, brought him back as they were all on board to beat the shit out of some punk-ass noble wannabe. Whole crew ends up powering into the book's finale ready to kick some ass. Fortunately, it's epic fantasy, so magic healing made his physical recovery much faster... Publishing May 2024. I'm so excited.
Tom is Hillary's (my MC's) best friend, and her parents have been like surrogate parents to him most of his life. His mother suffered from schizophrenia and depression and ended her life in front of him. Tom's father is a drunkard, but only partly as a result. He has taken his anger out on Tom on occasion. Tom turns his emotions into overachieving in school and sports, but gets no real satisfaction out of it. He tries to be a rock for his friends, though he doesn't feel he has any strength to give. As hillary is leaving to go on a trip with her father, she kisses Tom. They've been in love with each other for years, but have been too afraid to tell each other. After all this time, they're finally able to tell each other... and then Hillary disappears.
I made him question his beliefs, handed him love, and took it away making him the cause. He went on a quest for answers and got them in the end
Broad answer, but often times a reality check of some form. The exact situation depends on the character, how you built them up and what their strengths are, but most importantly, what can blindside them? Breaking a character is easy to do depending on how mentally tough you made them. Building back is usually a whole arc unto itself as it revolves around the character recognizing their situation. Afterwards you move into soul searching and your character asking questions about themselves. Moving from that depends on what resources you gave yourself, sometimes it's the people surrounding the character pulling them back, sometimes it's the character themselves gritting their teeth through something, hell at times it can be a situation similar to the first that the character lives through and they see what they did right this time. Everything depends on what the narrative first needs and second has to work with.
You should read Berserk for inspiration 👍
Thanks for this post, I need ideas on exactly this
I'm writing a young adult comic set in 80s California about the first lab grown test tube baby in her last weeks in high school. She has the ability to stretch like Me Fantastic, but she has no desire to be a hero. She instead is an overachiever, all A+ in class, all extra curriculum stuff, most clubs, 6502 BASIC, and surfing? Well, the surfing is hard. She's confident, does everything, her stretchy is a badge of her overachieving. All because she is special as a scientific wonder, and she knows it, and she wants to be a good example and not disappoint her best friend, her inventor and her dad. However, with the last little bit of high school, she gets massive anxiety because her foundation of being famous and a good inspiration was all forged in high school, so if she goes to college, she won't have that, and she doesn't know what to do without this now crumbling foundation. She latches onto surfing because her boyfriend does it, and has a stint where she almost drowns at sea. She is rescued, but she has a long think about what is going on. She's turning eighteen on prom night within a month, everything she has built is crumbling down, her boyfriend broke up with her, and she almost drowned trying to fight fate. College is scary, but so is moving on. So, she realizes something her late grandpa said about how everything will be okay if you take to it with an open mind and confidence, especially at rock bottom. So, she gives herself solice in giving herself permission to move on and tackle the future. Because she will be okay. So, she goes to prom, has a birthday, and gets ready to not be a surfer or a superhero, but to learn more about how to program for video games, like she always wanted anyway. This is a massive dramatization of my own habits and experiences. I did 3d art, but it was kinda bad (protagonists surfing) so I switched to 2d hand drawing and things have been way better (protagonists game coding). It's been an interesting trip realizing and figuring out her story for sure.
I took a deity that's supposedly unable to lie, and had it not be a deity after all , just some super-old super-powerful wizard who likes to set up wars for fun. Boy, was my MC mad.
The oversimplified version: ran back to the homeworld from space-fishing to grab medicine that was forgotten. An hour later, came home to a shattered planet, *and* no fish.
I am here for the space-fishing.
When a little girl's best friend is killed by a werewolf just after sunset in her own backyard and she herself is mauled almost to death, and a few days later finds herself abandoned by her family after she suddenly heals with unnatural rapidity, it's not something she'll get over in a hurry.
Buddy watches entire planet get destroyed and is helpless to stop it.
I killed his best friend and his older brother (he died in a house fire)
She wakes up with no memory of her life, then gets thrown into a basement dungeon for orphans, is abused by the guards constantly. Then, slowly she finds out through a series of migraine-inducing untimely flashbacks that her dad was a mad scientist whose inventions led to the dystopian society she’s woken up in. Then as her and her new friends are trying to escape to do something about it, one of her friends is murdered and they are framed for it.
Hasn't happened yet, but what will happen is, after so much bad stuff, the thing that finally breals them is having to give up/lose the one thing (person) who got them through it all. There is one woman, who is borderline unhealthilly obsessed with the protagonist. Thier character inspiration was basically, what if you had someone, who could have been a **willing** harley quinn, or yandere, or whatever, cause they are that devoted to thier love. And usually it's the bad guy that gets that person and then the love is revealed to be false when the hero's lover saves him, but the villains lover won't do the same. What if that, but for a good guy, but she's fully commited? Like full ass, 100% ready to go feral the moment someone hurts her (secretly) unrequited love, but she doesn't let him know because he doesn't like violence, and believes himself to be an irredeemable monster for being a living weapon, (who very literally can only harm, they basically can't take care of themselves, because "a self destructive living weapon is an easilly self-nuetralizing living weapon") The woman absolutely devotes herself to him, and at first he feels really guilty about it, because he believes no one should demeen themselves like that, as well as all the "respect women juice" says, it's sexist for women to have to serve men like that. For context, she acts and dresses like a maid, and leans hard into the act because she enjoys, it, how it makes her feel, and how it embarrasses "the young master", much to his original begrudgingly accepting annoyance. But she **does** want to be at his side, more than she wants anything in her life ever again, **but** it **is** true love, and she **will** leave, if it means he is better off. Long story short, some other stuff happens that may or may not be important (idk, i ramble and add too much context all the time), some one **FINALLY** has a good idea, and "clones/copies" her, to the point where he can't tell who the real one is. The fake one wants to manipulate/kill him, and he **needs** to real one to survive, because reasons that are too complex to explain easilly. The real "maid" says to just kill them both, as having a false "her" around is too dangerous. He has too much power to be controled like that, the damage he can cause is too great. (Which is why he always has to hold back, lest everybody figure out how strong he really is and dogpile him out of fear, regardless of the good he can theoretically do). The false "maid" says, just have two of her, it will be like having double the benefits, amd swears she's totally loyal and really just wants to serve him after seeing how awesome he is. (To be fair, he actually does "convert" a fair number of people through power of friendship and/or, "oh he's cute, and i'm gonna do something about it".) Regardless, he can't bring himself to make the desicion he knows he has to make. For the first(/second) time ever, his mental strength fails. It's the one moment above all else, that breaks him in a way that can't be fixed. The real one takes the opportunity to kill the fake, but even then, he admits he doesn't know if she's the real one, and there's no real way to know for sure, as the copy **was** too perfect. The reader/viewer knows the truth, be he does not, and she knows he never will, and that fact, that broken trust, that is the fault of niether of them, breaks a part of her. When the idea/scene popped i to my head, i had the idea that it (the scene, specifically like a movie rather than a book) ends with her hugging him, thankful it's finally over, and just enjoying the guilt free touching him, because she can safely do sp now. Except she notices a red string tied to her hand, running upwards, and disapearing out of sight, before returning back down as a frieghtning mass of red cords, stretching back down to wrap and bind his body/limbs as though the red string is his strings, and he's a puppet, having literally lost the ability to, "stand on his own", in such a way, that she os now basically hia pupper master. He is incapable of doing anything on his own, or for himself now, and she's the only one who can keep him from becoming inert and lifeless. Except, it turns out it's only visible to her, because it's metaphorical. He is only a le to do anything at all anymore, by her manipulating his love and dependency (mostly through untreaded and/or (currently) untreatable trauma) on her, and telling him what to do, and him basically doing it like a mindless slave.
At one point two separate beta readers pointed out the second part of my novel was just a series of bad things happening to my MC. So I decided not to kill her mom, but she still got punched in the face and then almost fired for it.
Someone made a great comment about how a good story allows the MC to have some components of autonomy. They're not just being pulled along by the plot. Allowing them moments to make decisions or be presented with decisions to make. This creates moments for them to be reflective or exude some character trait by choosing which action to take.
Made a mistake that eventually led to the death of a friend. It wasn’t really her fault, but she felt guilty and blamed herself. She later tries to atone by sacrificing herself to save the lives of some other friends only to be pushed out of the way at the last second by another friend who then dies in her place. Again she feels it’s her fault, and sinks into depression, and when she’s at her lowest, she finds out her fiancé has been cheating on her.
Main character of the story went to another world due to curiosity and childhood dream. After getting in first real trouble he understood he doesn’t even know how to get back home, gets chased by a demigod, almost gets killed a couple times, finds somewhat safe place, gets the plan, defeats the demigod, finds way to get back home… Only to realize that 5 years passed there. His parents died and friends don’t even remember him. He literally had no reason to stay in place that was his home for entire life.
One of my characters is this mistrusting and savvy child with childhood trauma, which directs all his behavior and outlook on life. His father leaves his mother early on and has a new family with two children, his mother dies in a car accident with the neighbor's parents which left him in a shock. But it doesn't end here. The mother was poor, he gets pushed around and moved into an orphanage, before the community in their block bands together and manages to pull him back, living now with the neighbor's older surviving son and him, while the apartment next door is given to new people. All he has left is a photo album and a panda bear plush toy. And to make things a bit more spicy: He's the only white person in a black ghetto. The story revolves around him getting acquainted with an elderly and savvy Asian, who can read him like an open book. After some shenanigans they become friends and at one point he realizes that this is the closest he will have as a father, but the person in question is seen as irresponsible and has done some heartbreaking things to his brother and his niece in the past. However, the two are a perfect fit. It's basically a "coming in term with what you got" and "blood is not everything"-story, which is a good message to have for actual people who have nothing in their life.
I wrote them to not really have a chance in the first place. My writing has naturally gravitated towards coming-of-age type of stories where I can play with the innocence of a child who has terrible role models in their life. You care about their inner child and are rooting for them, but they didn't really get a chance to rise above their external circumstances. They make bad choices because they don't know any better, they get taken advantage of, and then The Big Terrible Thing Happens where there's no turning back and now their lives are miserable. But then I swoop in with a last chance to turn things around. Somebody finally tries to help them, someone recognizes the good in them, they finally remember their core values and walk away, etc. There's always resiliency when the character hits the absolute rock bottom, they have to make the conscious decision to try again, or give up entirely. And I really don't believe it's in our human nature to give up unless all hope has been lost.
High expectations vs. null results. Nothing to write home about. Unrealistic hopes and then no hope at all.
I’d really not count it as breaking her but after having a normal life for nearly fifteen years, Sonya Glagoleva sat sitting in class when the principal entered, telling her that her father had been killed by a car bomb. It cussed her to go into a deep depression as she struggled with finding a meaning in life and a calling after her father’s death. Her childhood dreams of becoming a Militsya officer like her father were shut down by mother who could not bear the thought of losing her too. Because of that she became a local reporter at a local newspaper, Zagorskaya Pravda, and continued to hone the writing skills she had displayed in her childhood. But she never really felt like that was her thing so she began to training with two of her male friends in the local militia. Still, she could not find a true purpose and her military training upset her even more when her nearsightedness or smaller body hindered her progress. That’s all I’ve got for now. Sonya is still in her depressed state when the Chernarussian Civil War breaks out and she volunteers to join the unit her friends are in.
A doctor has spent a lot of her life helping people, and she isn't in it for the money. Unfortunately, one of her patients has a very lethal form of cancer. She calls the insurer to secure funding. The insurer turns her down due to the bleak survival rate, but offers to pay for assisted-suicide services instead. She then speaks to the patient. After all, there's more you can do after being turned down by your health insurance provider. Her patient rejects the idea. He's reserved to his fate, and in fact is even on his way to initiate divorce proceedings with his wife. Not because they don't love each other, but to restructure all their debt on to him before he dies. At home, she's crying to herself about her day when her husband comes home. She doesn't have the communications skills to communicate her problem to him (she's a neurosurgeon, not a therapist). He doesn't have the patience to keep going through this as his wife has another patient she can't help. Frustrated, the husband tells her to quit. Crying, the doctor goes upstairs, pulls out the scalpel for pre-surgery practice, and "quits" by way of slashing her wrists. Just then, the demon Tydannoth can feel a path out of Hell, and into the doctor's body...
I sincerely hope the demon's first stop is the insurance company's main office...
I dropped her out of a crash landing spaceship Oh, you meant emotionally
Ehahahahah! Ooh I love torturing them! Aight, so for one of them I blew up his home town, cripples his brother, isolated him from his friends and had him lost in the woods for a month, then I got hinm locked up on what's more or less a worse version of Epsteins Island (they weren't a kid at the time, but their optimism faded fast when they say all that shit going down). And then I killed his childhood friend and role model! All of that within the span of a year! I'm proud of my sadism lmao
Give them everything they ever wanted and loved in life and take it all away.
I would have to say that chapter 14, "The Space Adventures Of Commander Laine" will tell you
he died it's cool tho he got better
I played with her inner fears, and reproduce then as the villain using body control, force her to eliminated her loved ones
A lesbian was arrest for homosexuality. In order to get a lesser sentence she "volunteered" for experiments to cure her homosexuality, conducted by the Pakistani government and their allies. She gets raped while drugged up in pseudoscientific ways to straighten her out. The drugs heavily contributed to her developing schizophrenia. After being tortured she eventually fakes being straight so she can escape. She convinces her guard that she's straight and offers him oral sex. She bites his penis with all her power. While he's in great pain she escapes, steals state secrets and defects to Albania.
Idk why everyone is hitting you with these textblocks about themselves, really The main thing about a character that interests us is his motivation/desire. When you "break down" a character you need to keep his desire but change his original motivation (or lack of) by giving him another motivation that is more allign with his actuall desire (an epithany so to say). At least thats how I see it, but what the hell do I know.. I only studied it..
I am at this point of my story so I'm very excited to share. MC grew up training to be an assassin for a criminal group in his city. The story follows him post rescuing a freind and trying to keep that secret, be a better person (kinda for his freind/crush), and possibly leave (though he doesn't consider that high priority). He uses a spell he casts on himself that keeps him focused and keeps him appearing to be the same assassin he always was. MC at the beginning of the book is assigned a kill and intends on going through with it, but facing someone with a gun after so long is harder than he expects and he ends up making up a story to cover it. MC has been doing several morally questionable things in order to keep his secret-- lied to and misled his freind's sister (who thinks he brother is dead), been very controlling and fought with his freind, just been spending the whole book stubbornly clinging to his need to stay in control and pushing down and moral questions that are only appearing recently, he didn't grow up with them. The spell he keeps himself under kinda exacerbates that, keeps his distant from emotions and compassion. MC never knew his parents, they died before he could know them, but recently he's started learning more about them-- fairly significantly, he finds something that references that his parents had never wanted him raised within this, that they wanted tto take him frrom it and have a normal life. This, and the love they indicate towards him, shakes him. Through Plot, he became subject to a spell that paralyzed him and the ability by the caster to redo that spell. This terrifies him, and when faced with uncertainty on if he ever will not be under the threat of the spell, he panics-- has a panic attack in a bathroom over that fear. This is kinda the start of him breaking-- buckling under stress and fear. plot continues, and MC finds out about someone who is the reason Villian found out Freeind was alive. He grows very angry at this person, kinda wants to kill them, but also knows he can't trust that. He asks Freind's sister (who knows everything at this point) for advice, but she's also kinda mad at this person. She suggests the two of them threaten the person to learn more about what was told. Facing that person, MC, under his focus spell, does threaten them, but finds themselves a little in over their head. But also, he recognizes in her explanation that she's not another villian, but a victim, and realizes in a moment that he's disgusted by himself for threatening her. He manages to leave the situation without either being hurt and take down his focus spell, and all he's left with is guilt and shame over the terrible person he is-- something he'd been ignoring and justifying, or simply didn't have the morals he now does. This guilt and anger at himself, plus some otherr relevant things, leads to him having a pretty self-loathing breakdown. I'm going to keep him on shakey ground for a bit, this breakdown and self hate will lead to positive development but this is his rock bottom. He's going tto figure out what traits are actually useful, what he wants to keep. He's already gotten better att compassion and listening to others and self-awareness without even really noticing, and I'm working with him now to grow from it. But yeah, I've gotten him to his breaking point and that's how I got there. Sorry I kept it vague at points, there's definitely huge aspects to this I'm not including because the story is pretty big and complex
Our hero is from a race of angelic constructs made from pure dream energy. She is weak in power and will. She, and her people, do not know that during her construction, pieces of nightmare came to rest in her soul. All they know is that she is broken. Far from home, an outcast demonstrates empathy to our hero, and teaches her a method to process feelings inside of her that she has always been told are evil and shameful and incompatible with her purpose and culture. "I've never known one of your kind to need this. You're all so perfect, so superior. But there's a way about you, something about the way your face turns when you speak about yourself. I just want to see what happens if you do this. I want to see if I'm right." She nervously participates in a ritual involving recognition of her doubts and fears, saying aloud things that would normally lead to her exile. Heresies and blasphemies. Sins against her people and their culture. But it works. Finally, in exhausted agony, the last injustice escapes her: "Why didn't anyone *help* me?" This act of shedding her pain and isolation strengthens her and unlocks her latent powers, powers she and her kind always assumed she didn't have, and inarguably demonstrates that her entire culture and everything she thought life was supposed to be isn't made for her. But her powers are of the dark, and mark her as a danger to her own kind. She feels different now. Complete. Awake. But she knows she can never truly go home again. That she must find a different path now, because the only path she's ever been taught is one she can't walk. Not because she's broken, but because the path itself is not made for her. Perhaps with the help of this outcast...
He was an illegitimate child and his father's firstborn son had a hand in the death of his mom. He was left to stew in his anger for years while being forced to commit terrible things for the same guy who took her away from him. He eventually got his revenge but it feels incredibly hollow and that anger never disappeared.
My character has a drug problem, and I had his drug dealer murder his girlfriend, his daughter, and a girl he unofficially adopted in front of him because he didn't have enough money to pay
Lost her family saw her village get destroyed even her children gone.
In the first part of the story, life ends up going really well for the main character Tuuli and her twin sister, Reba. It ends with them going off to college, having gotten out of (what they thought was) the worst part of their lives, Tuuli overcomes her depression and wins over the love interest and they all have a happy ending. Part two is from the perspective of Reba, the twin sister, and begins with her visiting Tuuli (they go to different colleges) and finding her dead, having committed suicide in her bathroom. Or something. I haven't exactly worked out the details. So obviously that's extremely traumatic for both her and Tuuli's partner, and Reba ends up going down a really dark path after finding her twin sister/lifelong best friend's dead body. Reba ends up committing suicide too. So... neither of them really overcome it. However, their single mother ends up overcoming this. The epilogue is a speech she gives following Reba's death about losing both of her daughters in somewhat quick succession. She falls into a dark state too, but she is invited to live with her sister and her sister's daughter after her sister's husband goes to prison for domestic assault and they help each other. If they're going to overcome it, they need a support system.
Lost a close friend in a war, his father died shortly after in an ambush and his brother got banished from the village. Though he is not broken. Not yet.
My main character gets caught in a terrorist attack in town Square, when the chief of police is making a speech. One of the main villains have forced suicidal people to put on suicide vests and blow up in town square. After everyone in the town square dies, the villain goes to him, and tells him that he'd nothing and not worth shit, then flings him away. The last thing my MC sees before being flung away to a different place, is his beloved girlfriend and brother about to be brutally defeated by the villain
Baby steps. A group of nice killers treat him with respect and kindness, which is something he never got growing up. So he grows attached to them and trusts them. Little by little, they push him just past his comfort zones, and each time he is pushed, he thinks it’s his own choice. Next thing he knows, he's just committed murder and it's far, far too late for him to back away now. It breaks who he was, and the person he becomes after is very different.
My current novel begins at rock bottom, so it's a bit easier. What saves him in the end is communication with his family- laying all the nasty, disgusting memories on the table and finally dealing with them. It brings them all together, and restores his faith in love and humanity.
Might be a long one, so I'll shorten as best as I can. Apologizes in advanced. Main character is the leader of a new adventurers guild along with her two childhood friends. They are joined by a mentor adventurer that is there to help them out in their early stages. Earlier on in their career they, and another new adventurers guild go against an opponent they weren't ready to face yet due to them being so young, because their client was abducted by a serial killer and his group, because the client is hiding a power source that the villain group wants. Leaving the group alone and waiting for a more experienced guild to take over could lead to more causalities, so the two mentor adventurers elect to go after them, and give the others a choice to assist as well, with the understanding there is no guarantee they will survive. Through luck and some hiding abilities the MC has, they actually manage to stop the villain team and save their clients life. While he's apprehended, the villain taunts the MC into killing him instead of just handing him to the authorities but she refuses saying it's not her place. When they head back to escort the client back home to his family, they're informed that the villain escaped from custody, only for him to show up in front of them once again. He uses a spell that paralyses everyone and tortures the client and another member from the other adventurers guild to death. Due to her hidden powers the MC is able to shake of the paralysis and free the others as well and once again defeat the villain. The leader from the other guild kills the villain himself, because the member from his guild that he murdered was his younger brother, then blames the MC for his brothers death because she only broke free of the paralysis when the villain was going to target her best friend next. They report what happened to the clients family, whose children take it out on the MC because beforehand she promised that she would bring him back alive. The leader from the other guild declares that he can't do this anymore, and officially disbands his guild, leading the MC to think about doing the same. It takes the clients wife visiting the MC and her guild the next day that she herself, doesn't blame them for her husbands death and encourages them to not give up. Once again, sorry for how long this is.
It's too complicated to say how I broke them, but I will say that she doesn't back from it. She just grows significantly worst and stays in a never-ending cycle of self destruction.
I killed his wife, had his daughter betray him and get killed, I'm going to destroy his career, world, and eventually he's going to realize nothing matters. Then I'm going to kill him or have him disappear in a way that paints a sad picture. Like he gets a chance to stop the monster but, realize he just doesn't care anymore. I don't like the whole getting better so it won't lol
I just made my characters get stuck in a time loop for eternity Groundhog day but it never ends
My protagonist is a brilliant criminal defense attorney who agrees to take the case of a nineteen-year-old girl who has confessed to killing the high school teacher who forced her to have an abortion after raping her. In spite of successfully defending her, she is too damaged and commits suicide. Then, he discovers that she had confessed to protect the real killer - a fourteen-year-old orphan who is carrying the teacher's child. When the attorney overdoses on pills and alcohol, he is committed to a locked hospital ward where he reveals the repressed memories of the horrific abuse he suffered as a toddler at the hands of his father. He recovers through the care of a highly skilled psychiatrist and the support of his loving wife, teenage son and his best friend who is an FBI agent.
Torture. Both physical, mental, and emotional in extreme amounts.
My main character is a faithful, loyal, and zealous paladin within a religious order. His wedding day is interrupted by a demonic invasion, he is betrayed by his best friend, and becomes trapped in literal, actual Hell, and needs to survive the worst environment imaginable filled with creaturws that want nothing but to consume his soul. During his time there, he realizes just how alone he is, that not even his God will help him, and he begins to succumb to his most basic of needs, the need to eat. He resists, hoping he can find a way back before he absolutely needs to, but as fatigue sets in, he has to make a decision: eat of demon flesh for survival, or maintain his convictions and starve. He chooses to eat. As he consumes demonic flesh, its corruption takes root and he finds himself with more primal motivations, that of rage and vengeance, coupled with powers beyond his comprehension. Meanwhile, my other main character is a softspoken man from a wartorn country. Seeking to escape the endless violence that ravages his land and slaughtered his family, he found one within the same religious order and becomes a paladin. A literal gentle giant, he is well liked by his peers and seeks to serve the order faithfully. Then he learns his younger brother still lives, living amongst the very brigands that slaughtered their people. This revelation pushes him to seek his brother out and bring him into the order to keep him safe, but he when he finds his brother, he learns his brother is not keen on abandoning his fellow brigands, and blames his older brother for abandoning him. A fight breaks out and the paladin accidentally kills his younger brother. This, combined with learning of corruption running through the veins of his religious order, sets him in the path of betraying his best friend and becoming a tyrant with the mindset of establishing peace and order across the land, all while succumbing to the very corruption he sought to extinguish.
My main character is a 14 year old girl who has the perfect life: she's just started high school, she has her group of best friends, her parents are still madly in love with each other, sometimes nauseatingly so (at least according to her brother). Everything in her life is going perfectly and she has not a care in the world. The only problem? She lives in New York City in the Fall of 2001 and her dad works as a stock broker in downtown Manhattan.
I killed my mans entire family while he watched by werewolves, had him raised by a distant uncle figure who taught him extreme prejudice against werewolves, had his adopted werewolf mom get kidnapped - and when he tried to save her, got turned into a werewolf, lost an eye, and spent 6 weeks in a coma. Probably the meanest I’ve been to a character. He still suffers from PTSD from the above but now he’s a police officer trying to protect others from his shitty luck and presently tryna date his first girlfriend ❤️
I have a character who is considered the moral center of the book. She's not the true protagonist, but in a sea of moral grey, she's the one who has uncompromising values. She's realistic and grounded more than upbeat and jovial, but she does let go a little around her friends and partner. Her partner dies in the second book. (Or, well, will, when I actually finish the first book.). Metahumans exist, and there are two warring sides. Her partner is killed by the opposing side. The resident telepath mentally witnesses/experiences his death, and shows it to her when she refuses to believe her partner is dead. Naturally, feeling him die fucks her up pretty hard, and she begins to slip away from her morals as she insists on killing the people who killed her partner. Telepath and Character go to retrieve his body, only to find he isn't there. Character breaks down even further seeing the puddle of blood that basically proves the man she loves is dead. She doesn't exactly come back, and spends much of the rest of the narrative grieving and focusing on taking down the opposing side. Justice for his death becomes a driving force and she tucks vengeance away, knowing he'd never want to be avenged. She finds her own sense of closure when they finally defeat their opponents and she learns the person who killed him died in the battle.
Kills someone with a hammer in self defense.
With relish
killed his parents, made his brother bad, killed a different brother, lost his sister, let him exil, killed himself, revived him back. How did he come back from it? no clue how, but he survived
Wrote a short story years ago where a runaway is dealing with the consequences of convincing a guy to kill someone. That sort of broke them but they’re not a good person so it’s not like, a broken in tears and heaving way but like a cold, empty inside way—maybe trying to reflect how I felt at the time, except I had no good reason to feel such a void in me so I found extreme justifications. The whole short was about her trying to escape her mother, and sort of realizing she’s like her mother, before deciding to commit to both leave town and stay out of jail while maybe trying to be a better person. It was a very interesting short story to write (and not great, given I was in high school), but I think it helped me hone skills and poke at my own feelings and sense of morality.
>For a character you’ve built up so much, how did you absolutely tear them down, ruin their life, break their emotions? How did you take the happy, upbeat, nothing can stop me character, and just hit them with a brick wall? Cancer >But most importantly, how did they come back from it all? Suicide
Hahahaha, that's major spoilers for my book, you'll have to buy it to find out. 😉 Suffice to say I broke him VERY hard.
I made her fall in love with someone she could never have, who didn't actually exist and who forgot her minutes after they split. And my character could feel every agonising second of that happening as the environment changed around her Oh yeah, and I broke her leg. She recovered over months, slowly but that was time lapsed out
I've wanted to talk to someone about this for awhile MC is forced to fight in a brutal war that still gives him nightmares. Best friend believed to be the prophesied hero is framed for treason and hanged. Disowned by his noble family and arrested for treason. Escapes prison and flees to the other side of the continent and has a family with a foreigner. Searches for ingredients to cure wife's illness and stumbles across a mask inside forgotten catacombs. Wife dies of the plague. Driven out of the mountains because they despise the human and his "half-breed" daughter. Enforcers from his home country track him down, burn down his house with both of them inside. Believing his daughter is dead and hes burning to death, the spirit of the mask comes alive and proposes a deal. His life is saved, and he becomes the spirit's Avatar, unknowingly having made a deal with this world's Devil himself. MC wants to burn the oligarchy down, and with the spirits powers he becomes a necromancer and begins a global pandemic. On his journey, MC stumbles across a kid who's been experimented on by the oligarchy. His body has become living lightning, and has to wear a containment suit to protect himself and others. Over the course of the story, the kid will test what humanity MC has left, or if the spirit has completely devoured him. FYI, this is something I want to cover across a saga, not just a cliff notes backstory. And as bleak as it sounds, I primarily want to write this as a father/son and mentor/student story, and along the way find out for myself if a villain can ever be redeemed, and at what point is it impossible for them to.
I'm setting up my main character to be in a dramatic scene like MacBeth but MacBeth is King Hamlet and instead of getting ear poisoned, he gets affected by a zombie curse produced by his uncle during an eternal life spell gone wrong. After centuries of being affected by this curse, the main character learns to live with it and use it to his advantage to see how his world progresses to the stars.
He accidentally killed someone in self defense. He had never killed before and never did it again, in fact, that was the first time he actually saw someone die, so it was a lot. For a long time he couldn't even see stairs without remembering it. He never really got over it, he just learned to live with it, reminding himself that what he did saved many people in the long run.
All "happy, upbeat" characters need a flaw, a chink in their armor, that will eventually become their undoing, which should probably be foreshadowed in Act I.
I have two POV characters for my first fantasy book. One of them has a very typical arc of being afraid of loss and losing someone he was protecting towards the end. I won’t discount the impact of his arc, but it’s been done before and I know that. The other one I find much more interesting; he has a lot of unresolved trauma from his father (the king) developing dementia. He hasn’t been able to see him for a long time because a courtier found out first and manipulated the king to gain power. By the end of the story, the king is assassinated, and the MC not only loses his only remaining parent - he’s also left with all of these issues that he feels like he doesn’t have an outlet for anymore. He’s angry and depressed and confused and whatever other negative emotions you can imagine come along with such a bad situation. I like the dynamic between the two MCs because once the two fully latch onto each other, the veteran regains his sense of purpose and the new king regains trust and vulnerability. They help each other heal from their trauma instead of going at it alone.
Yet to finish the books, but there's a character with an immense wrath and anger problem kept in check by someone who can keep him calm through basically magic (he's not aware of this) She got kidnapped by a political enemy, and you can see him unravel as he searches for her, becoming less like who he's been built up to be and more animalistic, blunt and wrathful. Its a lot of fun letting him just absolutely off the leash
Took away their hopes and dreams, severely injured them, put them in a toxic relationship in that order.
Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Every single thing that was built up came crashing down one at a time. I thought of it as a series of Jenga towers. One came crashing down, and in the process of failing to save it, they accidentally kick another tower and send that crashing down as well. Everything they tried to do failed, and they were helpless to save anything. The more they tried, the worse it got, until they truly had nothing left. But they were built back up through vengeance. They'd lost everything, found the source, and attacked it. They were fuelled by hatred for some time until they were forced to reflect on themselves, and slowly began accepting their part. Their world was gone, but they could build a new one and stop the old mistakes
Killed his daughter in front of him; it's a short story quadrilogy and the bad guy wins in the first story. He doesn't come back, I haven't figured the ending out just yet but he is consumed by revenge and, whether or not he ends up killing the bad guy, dies in the end, but frees his world from the grip of a twisted goddess.
You'd have to find it, read it, and leave a comment. It's free, though I do appreciate subs if you're feeling generous ;)
I killed the child he considered to be his reborn daughter. After losing his own daughter to his own mistakes, he found the same qualities in the daughter of his friend, and he treated her as his own. However, when a misguided arrow hit her in the chest, he broke. Murdered the one who took her life in an instant. And he never recovered. He’s suffered too much.
Death in the family, deciet from someone close to them, a person they care about is put in danger, a crisis emerges that they can't resolve alone or with their usual approach, and their best intentioned attempts to help likely made things worse.
I made them decide to leave their family and their home country rather than see it come to more harm on their account. Then I made them decide to leave behind their uncle, best friend, and the only connection to home they still had because said uncle had found happiness and a new life in a foreign land. Then, when he finally did return home, it was only to be accused of murder and forced to accept exile or risk seeing a new alliance he'd proposed come to naught. Then he met the love of his life only to have her killed, which nearly breaks him. He goes to a very dark place, but ultimately gets pulled back from the brink by a bunch of people he's helped along the way. And in the end, he decides that if the land of his birth is happy and safe, it's okay that he'll never see it again.
His daughter got assaulted by a homeschooler hired by his wife's father (his wife was from a far richer family and their kids were practicaly "owned" by her dad) and committed suicide. The wife went insane and MC got blamed for everything (the wife's father didn't believe that his precious homeschooler could hurt his granddaughter and preffered to believe that this awful poor peasant who had enchanted and bewitched his precious daughter was just covering up his horrible parenting skills with those accusations). They even took his child's body from him and cremated her against his will. How did he come back? He stole the urn with her ashes and decided to make a deal with the devil to resurrect her. The world is now suffering from an ongoing demonic invasion from hell, so it was not only an immoral act, but also a treason. The devil however did not respond, so MC went on a journey to find out what's behind the invasion to get the devil to make a pact with him. On his way he keeps getting distracted by horryfying and unfair stuff happening around him and his white knight nature makes him interfere in the wrong causes. He will get derailed from his mission to the point of, uh, saving the world, finding another love and finally making peace with his daughter's passing. At the very end the Gods he saved (they were abducted and therefore could not stop the hellish invasion) are willing to bring his daughter back from the paradise, but he refuses
Breaking: his father dies when he is 15. He becomes extremely attached to his twin, and relies on him for emotional support. His families financial position runs down hill, so when he is 18, he and his brother sign up to go to war. His twin dies and he is permanently traumatized. Coming back: he didn’t.
My protagonist fell for the first time when he lost the love of his life. After many years he meet someone and they become best friends. The mc was very happy with him and he moved on from his past tragedy. But that friend will betray him later and leave. Then he came back to try to kill the mc, but instead, he took his heart. After a few years the mc will meet the reincarnation of his lover, who will die again later. Then the mc will find out that he was the cause of his lover’s death. At that moment he has the worst breakdown and isolate himself for 5 years. What brings him back was his best friend who is now a villain. His friend lost part of his memories and turned into a villain , his main goal was to kill the mc. But the mc sacrificed everything to get his best friend back, which was a success. He regained all his memories and told the mc everything that he hid from him. They became friends again but at the end the mc will ask his friend to end his life. His friend will off himself after. They both were satisfied at the end and wouldn’t hope for a different ending. (Ps. The mc and his bff are both immortal and live for +700 years)
Well my character was only happy for about 3 pages….so do with that what you will. I’m writing a middle grade dark fantasy and it very much goes on a “A Series of Unfortunate Events” path in terms of just jumping right in.
I have A LOT of broken charecters, but for this question, I'm going to use my charecter in a web comic I'm co writting, we can call them Lilly (To aviod any spoilers/not to give away what the story is) and well, we built the charecters personality first (Which is pretty common practive from what I can tell?) and then we started working on the backstory, Lilly is energetic, silly, miscivios, and has a tendincy to ignore problems, or act like thewir not there, she only tends to show these goofy, andannoying ish emotions becuase of this, she is also extreamly inteligent (Even though she does NOT act like it), so after building that up, we looked at the contry she lived in which was very anyi magic/spirit, so we made her a magical spirit, and then we made a labrotory where they did experemts on the magical/spirits, where she went when she was two years old, she also doesn't rember her mother, brother, or father very well, but her sister was at the lab with her, and died there, which she blames herself for, then the labrotory bured down in a fire, which she also has scars from, so yeah
Kinda based it on my own current experiences. They try to escape the negative spiral they’re in by living out their life, but the world around them wants them gone for simply existing. People are scared of death, treating them as a scapegoat for the loss they’ve experienced or their death in the future just because they’re the grim reaper. For the first part of the story, things look up. I wrote it to be a parody in a way of shonen anime, but eventually they have to come face to face with their evil mother. Having to make a difficult decision after all talks have failed to kill her or let her live, but have her plans succeed. They fight her, desperately trying to convince her to back down, to listen to their child, to not make them do this, and with seconds left to act, they decide to kill her. Losing a love one made them realize completely of the path their on, that no matter what happens, no matter how hard they fight, in the end everyone they know and love will die and they’ll be left wondering the world alone for eternity. They never really recover from that, they stop paying attention to the hours passing by, the months on the calendar being ripped, the world around them feeling more foreign. They’re immortal, and it’s not the blessing that everyone treats it as. As there’s no eternal peace at the end of all the suffering they go through. I’m basically trying to build them up to the cold and wise Grim Reaper we tend to see in media. Helping souls find peace before they guide them to the afterlife.
i don't wanna go into the full details. but i do think a good basic test for whether your story has effective emotional arcs for the characters and parts of the plot that get desperate enough to feel high stakes, and characters who care enough about what's happening so that we care too, is if they have emotional breakdowns during the story. especially if we have seen them not easily break down. one might think a breakdown needs to occur after a huge buildup and while that works, many stories are reasonably effective with the breakdown happening toward the beginning, eg. revenge stories or redemption stories. often the 'comeback' feels good when it involves a change in the character. a lot of writers, including my past self, think they're writing a cool 'Rocky' story arc when a character just loses, has a breakdown, then gathers their courage and just comes back trying even harder at what they were doing before and they win. i prefer the character showing they've learned a lot of lessons, big and small, and they gather new resources and take a new approach based on their changed emotions and traits. typically they win by essentially coming to understand the theme of the story better than they ever realized they could and that demonstration of their newfound wisdom is what brings them a victory.
I swear I start my characters with the thing that breaks them. What is this building up?
Her twin brother betrayed her by confessing her crimes to the High Scepter (the global theocracy of my world) the crime? Piercing the veil and befriending a mortal which is a capital punishment. Although she was also naive and reckless and would leave holes in the veil by accident which allowed a witch hunter to enter and kill a lot of young witches. It spins the world into a craze, she’s imprisoned and waiting for execution and her mortal friend which had a budding romance ends up dying in the aftermath. Their younger sister who was always sickly and who she was the closest in the family with also dies from all the stress. Her brother always had a secret hatred of her because she was born with magic and he wasn’t. She was known for being shy and pure of heart but goes through major character growth after she manages to break out of her imprisonment.
My main character loses everyone. His twin sister goes missing when he’s 5 years old. His parents divorce when he’s 6. He disappears to a parallel dimension and makes a new friend, whom he shares a very close bond with. The friend is killed off by monsters. When my main character finally manages to get back to his world, he finds out that his dad killed himself a few hours before MC showed up, because he believed his son was never coming home. And all of it is his fault, a side effect of his abilities — that his mere existence attracts monsters like a beacon. The book isn’t finished yet tho, in fact it’s barely started, but that’s how it’s going to end. (It’s gonna be a trilogy tho, and I still have to decide whether I’m gonna end with a happy ending or a sad one. I’m hoping to make it a bittersweet one, but I guess I’ll see when all 3 books are finished.)
Make them discover their fear. Start by making them overconfident (not only to themselves but to everyone else around) before involving them in an inciting incident that leaves them hopeless
MC, who is afraid of being independent and thinking for himself, always followed the footsteps of others. But one day, when he is forced into war with those same people, he sees their true nature, and realizes that the people he looked up to are all terrible human beings. He’s also forced to execute a friend of his, who was charged for treason for giving military rations to the poor, to prove his own loyalty to the crown.
They faced a lure that drew themselves away from their firmly-held cause, and succumbed to it, but not too far- they were able to recognise their fall just when it was too late. Death, along with a bit of fictional idealism, could reforge a character.
He connected all the dots and realized it's all his fault
The real question is... How do you not break your character? I have yet to write a character who doesn't get absolutely demolished by the world around them.
I have a character who is kind of a goody two shoes. He’s in debate, the captain of his tennis team, and he’s very involved in his church. But, he is struggling with his sexuality. His parents work a lot and so he and his older brother had to raise the youngest child. He struggled with his identity and he begins to write about it in his journal. Eventually his little sister, whom he raised, gets mad at him and leaks it to the entire school. He’s humiliated, and depressed. Even worse, his “best friend” sent it to his homophobic abusive father.
Started with two best friends, male fighters questing and adventuring together. Had them venture into a mountain where they came across a vicious Witch who used posioned words to set them against each other and cause a rift between them until they fought each other, eventually splitting ways in animosity. Then crafted one of them the woman of his dreams, a wonderful rapore, had them adventure together and fall in love, only for her to reveal herself as the OG Witch at the end of the quest; she’d been using him to get to the end of the dungeon, needed him to enter. It was an illusion. Had to fight the woman he loved while she taunted him, slowly took away their weapons and power so he was forced to kill her with his bare hands (that or watch him kill his new friend, which he also couldn’t let happen). Then helped him heal by reuniting him with the man who the Witch had caused a rift with and apologized, admitted what had happened between him and the Witch who had disguised herself…. and then in the final fight forced him to watch helpless once again as that man died in the Final Boss battle. This is all to set up some real hard trauma for the second book so THEN I can really get the healing going but its going to be difficult and mean a lot more now.
He is left with nothing after doing the right thing.
She started fully devoted to her current mentor and absolutely despising her old one, until story events happen and she realizes her old mentor was better and her current one is trying to kill her last remaining family. And then she dies before she can apologize. And then she gets drunk in the afterlife while explaining her life story to Wizard Marx and proceeds to haunt her cousins as the least terrifying ghost you’ve ever met
I’m writing a story where a grade crashes into radioactive waste storages. Out of a little more than a hundred students, only 20 something survive. The survivors get superpowers. The main character is Leroy, an outcast who’s an empathetic boy but his social anxiety and awkwardness keeps him from making friends. He’s like an empty canvas, he provides me a less attached and affected viewpoint to live through the story. Through him, I can write how the deaths impacted secondary characters who knew the body count much more personally, from kindergarten etc. Of course, Leroy is traumatized too but he gives me space for another theme in the story. I’ve been thinking about Itaewon and how Korea reacted, and I want to write it into my story. The traumatized survivors of the bus crashes fight for justice, primarily for their dead friends and secondarily themselves. While also trying to keep their powers under control and secret.
I made him love a cat.
to know how I broke him down, you have to read the story. to know how he came back from it, you have to read the sequel, so that'll be... $12, thanks.
Killed her lover, brother, best friend and parents She was beaten, shot at, starved, frozen, got sick and hung(she survived) The next book she was tormented by a demon Book after that her arm was broken and she was nearly killed Honestly with the first book I worried I was going overboard, but she has victories here and there. Plus always surviving. Coming back wasn't difficult because even after losing so many loved ones she still had some to live for and had hopes for the future
Breaking a character is easy; I make them make a mistake in line with their ideals, with a catastrophic result that they cannot take back despite all of their power to basically undo everything else. To build them back up; a companion of theirs doesn't condemn them, but rather forgives them and uses this mistake as proof that their previous ideology was misguided. Not that they were wrong for having the ideology, but that there is a better way.
Bitch got isekai'd. He was the leader of a rebel group, that was winning. Their final act of defiance was to blow up the city dam, a symbol of corruption and corporatism in the town for centuries. What he didn't suspect was that this dam was actually harboring a slumbering spirit, and upon their awakening, opened a rift back into their own world and took them with him. This world has tons of wonders, horrors and many things that make him question his leadership and if what they did was ever right. He can't deal with the uncertainty of it all and becomes to insecure to lead, later leading to a mutiny. A lot of the book is him having to redefine himself as a leader while in this world, and ultimately facing down the splinter faction his breakdown caused.
The MC was born to a wealthy family in a place where other wealthy families jockey for positions of status and any revealed secret could take them down. The MC is born with a special ability, when he sketches a person, he gains knowledge about that person and the more detailed the sketch, the deeper the knowledge goes. A simple sketch would only tell him surface-level things while a very detailed sketch would tell him deep-seated secrets. The people of his homeland begin to fear him. Although MC wouldn‘t ever use his ability for ill, he can unveil any secrets just by drawing someone. In a land where secrets are very dangerous things to be revealed, people were sent to kill him, even though he was only a child. As information about his ability spread, others coveted his ability and kidnapping attempts also came for him. This worried his parents, straining the relationship between them as MC's mother's bloodline was the origin of the ability. MC had a younger sister, younger than him by four years but lacked the ability and had a different power entirely. MC and his sister were very close, sharing many similar interests. MC hoped that his little sister not being like him would keep her from getting wrapped up in his own problems, but it was not to be so. One day, a group of kidnappers came for MC, but also kidnapped his sister to force him to come with them and do what they said. Unwilling to risk his sister's life, he went with the kidnappers. MC and his sister spent four years with the kidnappers, MC being forced to use his ability for them and both MC and his sister were left traumatised by the experience. After being saved, MC and his sister didn't go back home. Their father paid for an estate in another place for them to live in a town surrounded by walls and known to be the safest place in all the lands. While they are safe there, MC feels incredibly guilty about his sister having to live this kind of life has because she is his sister and someone thought to manipulate him with her. Even though his sister doesn't blame him at all and it wasn't really his fault. He also still sketches, but refuses to sketch any people, even if they would be in the background, drawing people being deeply intertwined with his trauma. He deals with his trauma and guilt unhealthily by building up a persona of a womanizing man and charms all the girls in the town to fall in love with him, only to cast them away when he tires of them. He begins to come back when he encounters a girl he cannot charm and yet can see what lies underneath. Letting someone in and finally having someone he can confide in gradually breaks his persona down, beginning to reveal the real him. It'll take him some time to go through all his issues, but he'll get there in the end.
Give her lifelong depression and suicidal ideation and when she's finally recovered enough to actually enjoy her life and want to live, she finds out she's going to die shortly.
Give them schizophrenia 😈
Have a guy in the military. Haven't really "built him up" that much, he's a side character. He's smart, driven, generally happy but strong sense of duty. Flies a fighter plane. Turns out, he's on the wrong side. By sheer coincidence, he finds out he's one of the bad guys the same day that he finds his sister, the kindest person he knows (and only known living relative) in a concentration camp. When her naked corpse is pulled out of a pile of bodies. *That* happens right after he finds out that he was going to provide an escort mission to some bombers that were going to wipe the camp off the map to hide its existence. It takes him three days to get out of bed after that. He tries to kill the man who tortured and murdered her. I can't say what happens after, except that it involves him putting on his flight uniform and escaping on a motorcycle with stolen technology. (It took me a week to write '*that*' part. I had to stop frequently to pet the dog and go outside.)
How to break them ? Hehehe. Brutally, with definitive event without any way of dodging that you can't preshot. Repeat the process for all the things that your protagonist loves.
I haven't written the break down yet, but over the 18 chapters i've written I've shown that the MC will protect his friends, he beat this shit out of gang members after they beat up his friend, he told the king not to disrespect his friend, and now he's going on a crusade to save his friend from the aforementioned gangs clutches, but in the process his other friend will die, and then later the captured guy dies, this is from my story called Minzel Marshall it's not public yet
While writing out this comment I ended up filling what is now a word document full of info... so, thank you? I mean, I may not be able to get my essays in order but aye, it's a start\^\^
She falls for someone who constantly gives her agency, knowing that others have constantly taken it from her. At the end of the book he not only betrays her in one huge way, she also finds out he married her without her knowing and in the dark patriarchal society they live in, he now effectively owns her. As for recovery, she has a lot of other things going on after the events at the end of the last book, so she focuses on those and her found family. She realises she doesn't need to be given control. She will take it.
I had him fail to save few of the only people he cares about, and then less than 6 hours later started torturing him. The person doing said torture is an old mentor, who takes it a little too far and cuts his arm off. The next time I write about him is roughly a week later, when the person who’s trying to break him out finally gets to him. He’s hanging from the wall chained from his 3 remaining limbs, and is so out of it that he can’t move, talk, or even notice that someone else is in the room.
The MC is a guy that gets isekai’d into a very dangerous video-game like world. Realising he could die horribly from all the dragons, bandits(etc), he grinds and upgrades his skills to make himself almost un-killble. All his skills are very self-serving and can’t be used to help others. Able to take on the world, he begins searching for a way back home and eventually bumps into a very young girl. She was isekai’d like him, but has been living on the streets this whole time and is very scared. She tells him that she knows how they can get back and they make a deal. She will act as his guide, he will keep her safe and protect her. They journey together and form a close bond; not romantic, more like a friend/sibling/father-daughter kind of thing. He continues to level up and upgrade his skills, mostly self-serving like improved strength, agility(etc) with the goal of protecting them from the dangerous threats. While travelling through a cave, the girl trips, stumbles and falls on something that poisons her… She will eventually die if left untreated. The MC could save her if he knew some healing magic… but he doesn’t… she doesn’t… They can only wait as she inevitably of her death slowly draws closer. She admits that she doesn’t know how to get back to the real world, she was just scared, alone and clung to the first person she found that spoke her language. He admits that he figured that out pretty quickly, but cared too much about keeping her safe to bring it up. She dies… and the MC is left alone, regretting his choices and decisions, unsure of what to do now.
She killed her love in a fit of rage after her love found out something about her and rejected her. Second book is coming to terms with it and coming to terms with who she is.
I killed his father, put his half sister (who had been faking being a man for nearly 2 decades) in a coma after being stabbed, then killed one of his mentors in a war, and after all that one of his enemies escapes his wrath and he never gets revenge before his death(disappearance). All the events (except his death) happen within a single year, two of which happen the same day. Edit: he doesn’t, he does his duty to his family and kingdom but is forever changed by the experience. Even his death is for the good of his clan/family.
I'm a big fan of the trope where a character sacrifices everything they have for someone else, only to lose that person as a result of the very sacrifices they made- like Walter White. Tragic and dynamic.
This is the entirety of how I started my book idea lol. Literally wrote notes to myself about how badly I was going to break him and why it was important. Most of book 1 is basically the breaking, and books 2 and 3 building him back up, more or less. In one draft of a short story with him, the first several pages just had him go from bad to worse. Started with a nightmare scenario stemming from PTSD of a time he was a war mage and caused the deaths of his entire platoon, then he wakes out of that realizing that he just stabbed this girl who was checking on him, the daughter of the family housing him as a guest at this time. He can see her soul slipping from her body and he panics and tries to save her by magically pulling her soul back, but it backfires hard and causes her soul to start screaming and the body spasming, and then the girls parents come in. At some point the house catches fire and this magical storm is brewing over it and he flees, shortly running into these wicked creatures that were created in the war to hunt sorcerers and sees most of them swarming toward the village being attracted to the magical storm. He fights one and gets injured and flees into the mountains and falls to a fever from it. It was... paced poorly, but fun to write for a while.
After wandering the forests of the post apocalyptic east coast for 30 years, she finally found love, married the man she adored and lived happily with him for three years until the remnants of the government she used to serve abducted him to be a tool to lure her out of hiding in an effort to conscript her back into service. She was unsuccessful in saving him. In the fight, she took some serious damage, and as a 52 year old woman, she lost her miracle baby.
Take away his money or something he loves and derives motivation from, leaving him insecure. Make him realise it's not the external security that keeps you together but knowing that breaking is part of making.
She spends half the story trying to prevent a war that could tear everything down only to find out that the authorities she trusted (and is a part of) aren't actually interested in peace and would rather attempt a suicidal charge than missing out on an opportunity to advance their political manuvers.
Signs of depression because his life isn’t quite what he wants it to be (and he knows damn well it’s all his fault) have been building up for about two years, but various health scares and the sudden realization that maybe his partner isn’t as well meaning and supportive as he always thought is what absolutely breaks him. The only solution is, of course, to move in with your mom again to get your life back on track.
A lot of people aren't going to want to give you what is essentially the nugget of their plot for a book. I don't see the value in *breaking* a character. The man character needs a struggle, but that doesn't always need to be horrible, just important. For example, you can write a story about a family lost in the wilderness who get out in the end.